Limit Dreamcatcher
by itsnotirony
Summary: After changing her name and unwillingly leaving university to join the Order, an exorcist tries to come to terms with the wreckage that is her uncertain future, slowly realizing that it is clearly not possible.
1. How To Live Without A Soul

I do not own D Gray Man.

* * *

This is not the beginning but it might as well be.

* * *

"I found this in the armoury," Mia pointed to the old battered skateboard she was holding, "can I have it?"

Reever looked at it carefully for a moment, uncertain of whose it was.

"Sure, but I don't know why it was there. It might've belonged to…"

 _A dead kid_. Mia knew what he was going to say and yet he refused to say it, so she hugged the board and glared at him.

"It's fine," she mumbled, "I'm sure it's not haunted or anything."

 _Yeah, but…_ Reever's face said.

"It's fine, Chief," Mia reassured him because Reever had begun to look at her with that uncertain, melancholy gaze reserved for dying children. Mia wasn't dying and she was fifteen for God's sake. If not for the wealth and privelege her family bestowed on her which allowed them to blaze fearlessly through the patriarchy, she'd have been married with children by now.

"Just don't hurt yourself'."

 _There are a thousand other ways in which that could happen tomorrow._ It wouldn't be appropriate if one of them was a hobby since God had chosen martyrdom for her, without even asking. Was she not allowed to die laughing?

Mia stuck her tounge out at the scientist and chucked the skateboard at the floor where it clattered loud enough to startle the enitre departament back to work. Kicking off the ground with her back foot she zoomed out of the lab, less gracefully than was intended to but with a feeling of sudden, fleeting freedom that tugged at her heart.

"EDITH!"

Mia heard her old name and purposefully didn't react, pushing off of the floor to gather momentum. Edith was gone, along with Ethel and all their dreams, and there were names in a mausoleum to prove it. Olivia had to come to terms with that, no matter how painful it was.

" _Eeeedi_ \- fine! MIA!"

The Exorcist turned to see her best friend running to catch up with her, waving a leather-bound book in the air. A couple of pencils dropped out of her bun, spilling her hair across her shoulders and Mia, about to laugh at Olivia's inability to keep her curls in check, rolled the skateboard into a wall.

* * *

"I'm not usually like this on the battlefield," Mia explained, holding tightly onto her ankle in case it fell apart. The offending skateboard lay upside down where she was too upset to pick it up.

"I really hope so," Olivia said, her voice on the verge of breaking. Mia had meant it to be humorous, but realized too late that talking about being an unwilling teenage soldier so nonchalantly made people uncomfortable.

"I'm really not. I know you can't see me when I fight, but I am _so totally awesome_." She untangled a ribbon from her hair and tied it firmly into Olivia's. Her friend smiled at her gratefully.

"I'm sure that's true. Mia?"

"Yeah?"

"I want you to have this."

The book that Olivia had been chasing her with turned out not to be a book at all but a journal. Mia flipped through the empty pages with curiosity. The paper was not quite white, thick and rimmed with gold. Running her fingers along the beautifully embossed leather reminded her too much of home; among the cold empty stone of the Black Order Headquarters the feeling was like a hearth.

"Why? What is it?" Mia questioned rhetorically, closing her eyes and pressing the book to her chest. Olivia suddenly became concerned.

"It's just a journal, silly… It's for writing in, not crying over."

* * *

Mia let a drop of ink fall onto the first page. She wasn't sure how to begin, but she loved the sharp contrast of black against white, and how it would slowly fade over time and disappear into the inevitable oblivion long after she did.

 _There is always hope_ , the page informed her in Olivia's handwriting. Her best friend wanted this diary to be a positive thing; something to remind her that she could, and should, still care about where her life was going. That not all the choices have been made for her.

 _MY NAME IS MIA._

This was how the second page began and ended. Writing this in giant block capitals, she let nothing else uproot the fact that her name was Mia.


	2. What Are They

Just in case anyone was wondering, this story will not be updated regularly. Warning: strong language. Oh, and if anyone wants to read this on tumblr, it is also on my tumblr: _how to live without a soul_ tagged as _limit dreamcatcher_.

* * *

This is inconsistency.

* * *

Like a lot of the order, Mia held a particular dislike towards Kanda Yuu. They were about to reluctantly go on a mission to France together and she was saying goodbye to Olivia in form of a promise to return with the prettiest pair of shoes she could find when she heard Kanda scoff quietly from the boat.

"Spoilt rich brats," he muttered under his breath. His unnaturally quick reflexes saved his life because otherwise he would have to be buried with an axe lodged so deep in his skull it would take a crane to pull it out. Mugen cut all the way through the wooden handle, but the clanging of the blade on the stone was lost in the profanity of Mia's swearing.

"Now you're dead, dimwit," Olivia, crossing her arms, hissed at his apathetic lack of expression. Kanda looked at her with all the kindness of a demon, and when he spoke, his voice matched it perfectly.

"I stand by my word."

Komui didn't interfere. He was cranky because Lenalee would be meeting them in Paris instead of returning to HQ.

 _Next time I'm going use the revolver,_ Mia thought vengefully as she sulked to the armoury for a replacement axe. Olivia was smiling like she was trying not to laugh; her companion in hate, though she preferred to be a little more subtle in her revenge.

"I really don't envy you right now."

"I know… but I couldn't help it. How dare he? Geez, how did Innocence even pick a jerk like that?"

"I really wish I knew." Olivia sighed, "but you know, there is something weird about him.. I don't think he's entirely normal."

"Of course he isn't! He's a- wait, what do you mean?"

She shrugged, frowning at some distant memory. Olivia was fascinated by puzzles and hated unsolved mysteries but something about what she knew was holding her back from investigating further. Mia wondered how terrible Kanda's past must have been to make him like this, and to make Olivia of all people back off.

"I don't know, I just heard some things," she said quietly, her fingers reaching for her teeth.

"Like what?" Mia insisted, grabbing her hand gently before she could ruin her fingernails. Olivia shook her head in a way that Mia recognized as a cue to stop asking, so she kept quiet and they simply held hands through the short journey. Olivia prayed that Mia would come back and Mia prayed that Olivia would still be there when she did return.

It would keep bothering her, but it wasn't like she cared about what Kanda was enough to break the rules. She just didn't want to ever be anywhere near him, and besides, the more she knew about a person the harder it was to hate them.

* * *

The Finder Grimstad was unfortunately one of the sensible ones. Finders were usually fairly intelligent, maybe not educated enough to join the science division, but also adventurous and brave enough not to go into the diplomatic division, (the hellhole of uptight control freaks). Mia couldn't care less about Grimstad, but he was much better company than Kanda so she talked endlessly just to annoy the other Exorcist.

"I'm glad the weather is so beautiful! Do you know what it's going to be like in France?" she asked brightly. "We should go for ice-cream when we get there!"

"Um," Grimstad said, glancing uncertainly at Kanda, "sure, Miss Exorcist, but I fear there may be some demons in need of slaying and Innocence fragments in need of finding before we can do that." He talked down to her which only made this simpler.

"Really?" Mia widened her eyes and raised her voice another octave. Kanda's trademark furrowing of brows made it's entrance. "And there I was, thinking that we were just going for the shoes and ribbons. Silly me!" She giggled with the mirth of a thousand dying stars. "There are so many dressmakers in Paris that I wouldn't even know _where_ to start!"

The Finder dropped his fake smile slowly as Mia bared her teeth.

"Do you know where the best coffee-shops are? We'll have to go to the _cutest one_!" She joined her hands and brought them close to her face in a mannerism learned from people-watching in fancy London cafes. "Gosh, I can't _wait_ -"

Kanda left the compartment.

 _Yes_. Mia wiped the grin from her face and turned the lock on the door. She fished out her journal and Waterman pen from her pocket and the rest of the journey she spent writing down different strategies for getting rid of certain people.

Grimstad looked at the window, wondering why it was that he agreed to lead this mission in the first place.

* * *

Grimstad knew that the one most important thing to know about Exorcists was that they weren't to be underestimated. From the outside they might seem like a varied bunch but there was a certain kind of order to the chaos in that every Accomodator chosen by God was relentless to the point of obsession. Not just about killing Akuma either. A lot of Exorcists liked to think of themselves as heroes, and no matter what level of confidence they possessed, nothing would lighten the terrifying weight on their shoulders gained from being repeatedly told that they are the only hope left for humanity.

Looking at Mia's frantic doodling and overwhelmingly pink hair, Grimstad had doubts about humanity's chances of survival.

* * *

Mia hated the Parisian train station almost instantly. The atmosphere was stifling with the chatter of people living their beautifully normal lives, unsuspecting of the monsters hiding amongst them. She wanted to scream at them, to warn them before the Earl made a feasting ground of their grief. She wondered how many people in history had ever refused to call back their loved one's soul, and whether any of them had lived to tell the tale. She wondered how it was that the Earth was still around for her to be born into.

It took two hours to navigate out of the busy train station, around the cobbled streets of Paris and into the neatly paved garden of the University Library. Mia cursed Komui for sending her to this place. He must have known how she would feel so was he finally starting to think less like a father and more like a Branch Chief?

Grimstad, seemingly reading her mind, looked at her doubtfully.

"They tell me you used to study at one of these?"

 _Don't look so fucking surprised._ She dropped her skateboard, finally finding a reasonably even path and rolled it backwards and forwards to test the ground. The sound of the wheels on the pavement was excellent, though still slightly inferior to the HQ corridors.

"That was a long, long time ago," she lied politely, glaring at the green tinges of sunset stretching it's dying light over the tiled roof. Seven months ago, in Vienna, a girl called Edith stayed up all night with her two best friends and a bottle of stolen whisky perched on the rooftop of their rented apartment. They watched the stars wheel around the sky until they were swallowed by the sunrise and their falling eyelids.

"Let's just get this over with."

* * *

Mia closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It would take at least two hours to search the five-hundred meter radius, and keeping her Innocence activated for that long still left her with a headache and an unsteady heartbeat. The chair she found in the abandoned library was comfortable but not overly so – a certain compromise was reached to ensure the aesthetics of the room were in order, which left the seating stiff and unsuitable for sleeping in.

Axe in hand, she opened her eyes and reluctantly stepped out of her body. Several things immediately caught her attention, the most important of which was that she begun seeing everything in black and white. She blinked a couple of times and cartwheeled across the hardwood flooring to clear her head but the scenery remained gray.

What are you up to, Innocence?

The grayscale thing wasn't that unusual. Other Exorcists, for example, would lose colour when she looked at them with her Innocence activated.

She scanned the library for Akuma, just to confirm that there was no-one there who could potentially (very easily) kill her. She had set up a talisman barrier around her, but those were never as effective as one wanted them to be, and Grimstad - who sifted slowly through the bookshelves looking for the innocence fragment - was next to useless in front of an Akuma.

Finders are too brave for their own good.

When she left the library, the colour returned to her surroundings, bleeding through walls and running down carpets, not quite the proper shade but recognisable as colour none-the-less.

Immediately, two patches of bright light appeared before her. The souls of Akuma glowed in a colour halfway between cerise and rose; not coincidentally the exact shade of Mia's hair. They stood out helpfully among the muted greens of her vision, shining through brick and wood like infra-red beacons. Not seeing any other people around them, she dispatched Kanda to their location through the ghost of the golem she had taken with her and continued searching.

The busiest place was the courtyard. Hateful, diligent students hung around outside the library when it was evacuated, still hoping to return and continue to greedily consume the knowledge and power they had paid for. It made Mia's heart ache that Ethel and Olivia would have definitely been among them, had her sister not disintegrated into ashes.

There was one level-two methodically scanning the square from a hidden alcove. It seemed to be searching for something, deliberating, or just leering hungrily at it's future victims. After four months, Mia had still not gotten used to the sight of their mangled souls, bound tightly to their host machines. The steel clanged when it moved, drowning out the quiet suffering of humanity. She almost had to close her eyes.

Her Innocence spirit didn't make a sound when she approached the figure, but from experience she knew that the demon could see her as a vague green blur. By the time it figured out that she was there to destroy it, her axe was too close to it's head to allow for any sensible reaction.

Two kilos of steel rammed into the chain holding it's power source attached, breaking it like brittle glass and slamming further into the wall behind it.

The demon stood gasping for a moment, it's stolen human body still wide-eyed with shock and pale as death, though no-one in the courtyard took notice when it crumpled sadly to the ground.

Neither did Mia, because she had already moved on.


	3. Emotions Are Destructive

This chapter is weird because its the last one from the happy ones I guess, the others were all written to the soundtrack of We Were Promised Jetpacks.

I do not own DGM.

* * *

I picked differential geometry because it's one of the modules I have an exam in, in January. I have no idea how old it is.

* * *

Clattering like an angry elevator, the skateboard slammed back into the ground, perfectly upright. Her feet connected to it successfully a millisecond later and Mia swung her arms into the air in a victory dance.

"HA!" she exclaimed, loudly enough to make Kanda wince. "HA! Take _that_ , rebellious dead kid!" she repeated at the skateboard, which was for once sitting calmly on it's wheels under her feet, instead of face-down and tangled in her ankles.

"Quiet down, idiot," Kanda repeated for the tenth time. Mia stepped down onto an end of the board and pivoted around to face him with a grin. She could not hate anyone right now, not even Kanda Yuu.

"But didn't you _see_ that? I bet you couldn't do it. Ha! I bet you won't even try!"

Kanda didn't rise to the challenge, but that was okay because Mia was content with being the only and best skateboarder in the Black Order. She pushed off the ground and traced a square around the bench that Kanda was sitting on. Passersby glanced at them both with curiosity from time to time but turned away quickly seeing Kanda's impatient glare and the way he perpetually kept his hand on the hilt of his sword.

Mia had tucked her hair into a bandit cap and pinned it securely to her head to keep it from getting in the way and to draw less attention. Girls on skateboards weren't common even in France yet, much less girls on skateboards with dyed hair.

They were waiting for Grimstad, with whom they had agreed to meet in the early morning in front of the library to continue the investigation. The finder was almost an hour late already and Mia was waiting for Kanda to say something to the effect of 'let's just forget him and go', because she didn't like to be the heartless one if she could avoid it.

By the time she executed a third perfect kickflip, she had to stop and wonder if something could possibly have happened to him. He had stayed behind in the library when Mia left, but she figured that he had to sleep _eventually_ and it was most likely that he returned to the Finders' House soon after. Unless, of course, the demons realized that their friends were destroyed and gathered around their target.

She stomped on her skateboard to propel it into her hands and turned to Kanda.

"Something's obviously happened," she began. The other exorcist didn't bother opening his eyes to answer.

"Do whatever you want. I'll keep a look out here."

Lazy bugger.

"There might be Akuma."

Kanda smirked.

"I'm just saying," Mia explained before he could interpret it like he was about to, even though her tone of voice should indicate the meaning clearly, "you like killing Akuma; there might be Akuma."

"There are plenty here."

"What?" Mia glanced around at the square, activating her Innocence. In the corner, mostly hidden from view, three demons hung around chatting. Level twos. Probably just observing the library. She shook herself back into her body and stared at them unhappily. _How did he know?_

Mia had grossly underestimated Kanda's common sense, but then again, he's been with the Order since forever from what she'd heard. This kind of thing even the dumbest idiot would inadvertently learn to notice.

"Dimwit."

She suddenly felt like the very definition of child soldier.

"I'm going in. You uh… keep stalking them or whatever."

She left, depositing her body on the bench, before Kanda could remind her that she had no right giving him orders.

* * *

She found no Demons in the library, but she did find Grimstad. He was asleep by the door like a child locked out of the house, with books precariously stacked beside him. They were mostly mythologies, complete with an open copy of the Christian Bible that he clutched in his hands.

It made her wonder who had to die for him to find out that Akuma existed. Because the Order was so secretive about everything, hardly anyone was even aware of the danger until their homes were razed to the ground by monsters. She reckoned it was because there was a non-trivial number of people who would actually join the Earl in his efforts of constructing an apocalypse.

Mia picked up the heaviest looking tome from the floor and flew to the top of a bookshelf before dropping it beside the sleeping Finder.

He startled awake, blood draining from his frightened face. Mia deactivated her innocence and the library faded from her view.

"He's coming," she said to Kanda, who was still meditating calmly. He had moved to the other side of the bench, as far away from her as he could, which was actually quite considerate of him. _It is so easy to hate people who hate you back._

"Right."

"He was in the library! Asleep. Probably just trying to fit in."

Kanda ignored her, and she continued talking so that she didn't have to think about how much she just wanted to be here as a civilian. It would feel so normal to sit all day in the natural quiet of the library, learning how to integrate increasingly difficult functions.

"Why are those Akuma still alive?" She asked, hoping this question wouldn't be taken rhetorically. Kanda made a dismissive sound because he was an enemy of answers.

He was making it difficult for her to stay distracted, which was one of the reasons why Mia hated him. _If he had not killed them yet it meant that he was… what, gathering information? Was he lip reading? Is his hearing really that eerily keen?_

Grimstad appeared then, to save her from the Empty Silence of Kanda's Social Craft. He apologised once, clearly and with no sincerity and the Exorcists followed him back inside the library.

* * *

"The door was gone," the Finder explained, "I would have returned to the Finders' House, but ended up learning quite a lot here so-"

"You mean you couldn't _find_ the door." Mia was certain the door had been in existence when she was there before, Grimstad had been sleeping against it.

"It just…" he was obviously trying not to look embarrassed about it, "it wasn't there."

Kanda muttered something with contempt. Grimstad ignored him, glaring at the framed entrance of the library hall. Mia couldn't help but compare it to Vienna, compare the sound of her combat boots on the marble floor and how different they sounded. She looked down at her feet and if she wasn't so tired of thinking about it, she'd vow to destroy the Millennium Earl there and then just so she could take off her boots and curl up with a book.

"If you read our report you would know that this has happened before. It was the reason why we began investigating."

"I read it," Mia said defensively. _Who am I even kidding, I'm never going to be powerful enough to last five minutes against the Earl_. A pessimist to the core, she had given up on revenge the day she saw a batch of statistics that Olivia was doing analysis on.

"It's like the library didn't want you to leave…" she said dryly to Grimstad and found him looking at her with more pity than she assumed he possessed. She continued, "it probably saved your life – I mean, if it sensed demons outside then it was certainly nice of it to trap you inside."

"Oh," The Finder grinned for some reason, probably only known to fellow Finders, "that's actually kinda cool."

When he looked away, Mia took that chance to cover her face with her hands and wipe some misery off of it.

Kanda muttered something. It was starting to get really annoying.

"What else did you learn?" She asked, artificially trying to smile and regretting it almost immediately until she heard, _You're in a library, Mia,_ in Olivia's voice, _make the most of it_. With that, she managed to feel a little less hopeless; if they finished the mission quickly, maybe they would let her stay here a few hours before the train.

"The books physically rearranged themselves on the shelves. I don't know what system the librarians use, but currently it's a havoc."

"Maybe…" Mia shook her head and stared at the shelves in amazement, "maybe that's what the Innocence is upset about. All we have to do is find a good system and then everything will go back to normal."

Grimstad and Kanda, for the first time ever, shared an equally doubtful expression, but Mia was too far gone to care about logic. She continued excitedly, "the Innocence is just trying to help these people lead better lives!"

 _Yes, yes, and even if I'm wrong, this is going to be so much more interesting than exploding Akuma._

She ran off to find a catalogue, hunted by the memories of her past.

"If we help to organise the books," she shouted from the front desk that was actually in the centre of the room, flanked by rows of lesser tables, "then the crystal won't have anything else to do so it will give itself up! GRIMSTAD!"

The Finder visibly shivered. Mia had found the catalogue, which was so thick that it was in the form of a shelf full of catalogues, and deposited the first batch onto the desk.

"Call the other Finders! We're going to need all the help we can get… Ask if anyone knows the Dewey Decimal System and someone find me a copy!"

Grimstad turned away and left quickly enough that he didn't notice Mia clear the table with a wide sweep of an arm. Inkwells and stacks of papers flew down onto the carpet to make way for the leather bound volumes.

"KANDA!" She shouted, forgetting in her excitement that Kanda was very unlikely to listen to anything she said, "you watch for Akuma. They probably know the Innocence is here and will want to attack."

Kanda's eyebrow twitched and she paused to give him a level look that he left the room to avoid. _Why the fuck is he here_ , Mia wondered, _is he even literate?_

* * *

"Lenalee's here!" Mia swatted her golem away and turned to The Finder.

"Great," Grimstad sighed, closing a book and reaching for the Dewey facsimile and a pencil, "but are you aware that Miss Lenalee has her own book system?"

"Really?"

"She set it up in the HQ library. It took her a month and she doesn't like it when people mess with it." Grimstad paused, his expression darkening. Mia laughed, happily at the image of _Lenalee - the Guardian of the Library._

"Well, yes," Mia agreed, having a fair amount of experience with both librarians and Lenalee, "but she shouldn't have anything against Dewey, right?"

"Sure. I mean, I like the thought of every library in the world sharing a system, but I think I'd honestly take Miss Lenalee's over this.."

Mia went back to the bookcase she was emptying, too far into the work to worry about discarding Dewey. It was a depressing thought but he probably had a better chance of saving the world's libraries than any Exorcist.

Some past librarian had tried to make the shelf on geometry but some history of mathematics had sneaked in, and a biography of Isaac Newton. She opened up an introductory book on differential geometry and sat on the ground. The lower shelves were still occupied which meant that she could hide behind them from Grimstad, who had a very strong sense of justice and would not tolerate doing more work than her. The maths was hard. Second year, probably, maybe third, so she zoned out quickly after reaching tangent spaces, when the proofs looked only vaguely like anything she had any hope of understanding.

* * *

She dreamt about Ethel, like she had most nights since she died. Mia always dreamt about the day the demon appeared, but today it was different. Ethel was alive, as alive as she had ever been, pulling Edith's hand as they walked into their dorm room. They both laughed at the sparse surroundings, whitewashed walls, squeaky metal beds and dusty floor. Ethel found some oil paints later and painted a mural on one of the walls, so that the room was turned from an intended prison into a refuge, wolf eyes staring out from surrealism.

They shared a desk – a plain wooden table where they worked into the late hours - balancing candles and oil lamps in the midst of expensive parchment saturated with numbers.

Edith looked down at her work, a mess of scribbles that she was attempting to prove a lemma with. It was something trivial to do with vector spaces. She looked back at the lemma, and then to the parchment, a sinking feeling in her stomach as it blurred into gibberish. She wrote down the result again, but however carefully she copied it, it was always wrong. The tip of her pen twisted into a mangled shape and broke when she attempted to scribble out her failure.

"You're never going to be a mathematician, Mia," Ethel said, the last word weird in her mouth because Mia had never heard her say it, "don't even try."

Ethel's face was deadly serious and pale, ripped from the near future when it would turn into pentacles and fade to grey.

"Mia?"

Ethel crumbled in her clothes splashing dust across the table. The cover of parchment fanned out onto the floor from the impact.

Someone said her name again, and she dug through cobwebs to find the voice. Her hands found a face, and then she opened her eyes and saw that it was a stranger. Her breath escaped her.

Lenalee carefully caught her hand before Mia managed to poke her eye out, and squeezed it before giving it back. Mia blinked, slowly remembering that she knew this girl. Her heartbeat was audible and uneven.

"Hi, Lenalee," she smiled, taking a minute to assess her surroundings and gather her senses. The memory of Ethel was still vivid and she stood and dusted her coat in an attempt to force herself into thinking of the present.

"Morning, Mia," Lenalee said, "I see you have adopted my brother's work ethic."

Mia's smile became wry, but it was still fake and she felt a shudder shake her breath.

"Don't tell Grimstad or he'll quit," she told Lenalee, gesturing at where she left The Finder with her thumb. Seeing that he had moved on to the other side of the room she felt a little stupid. Lenalee looked at the book that Mia had been holding.

"I could never even get past reparametrizations," she said absent mindedly taking it from her and flipping through. "How are you finding it?"

Mia was too startled at Lenalee's words to reply immediately. _Of course. She's spent almost all her happy days at the Order in the science division. She organized the HQ library. She's one of us._

Besides the fact that 'happy days at the Order' was a weird, horrific phrase, it made sense. The thing was though, that now it was starting to get really difficult to think of reasons why she could hate Lenalee.

"I wasn't expecting geometry to be this abstract," Mia confessed eventually, looking around for the classification chart.

"I'm sure you'll manage it," her new best friend smiled at her sweetly. Mia wished Lenalee wasn't so nice, and also dangerous, so that she could kick her in the face. _Manage it? Sure, next time I'm in the hospital, high on painkillers after I almost die to save this damn planet I care nothing about. Being an Exorcist isn't a fucking hobby._

"Of course I will." Mia piled all the differential geometry texts into her arms and started walking towards where they decided the mathematics section was going to be. Lenalee looked annoyed for a moment, but she seemed to have noticed that something was wrong and changed the subject, not even bothering to look downcast.

"You're using Dewey?"

Mia knew that Lenalee had been about to say something else, something that was bound to make Mia a better person if she took the time to think about it. She wished that the girl had said it, even if it would have made someone cry.

"Yes."

She nodded at Grimstad as they passed him and Lenalee executed a cheerful greeting that most people mistook for friendly. Mia was trying really hard to keep being irritated at her.

"It's very _fashionable_ right now," she added, and dropped the books onto the carpet. They fell with a thud and she propped them upright with her foot while she checked the chart again and inspected the other piles, grabbing a pencil and some index cards to fold into labels.

Grimstad silently handed Lenalee a copy of the Dewey Decimal Classification.


	4. Still A Symbol

It's all downhill from here. Trigger warning: death.

I do not own DGM.

* * *

The library breathed like a giant pair of lungs. It drew air through thick tomes, colouring it with the scent of old paper, slowly permeating everything with it's crystal soul. The Innocence decided that the Dewey Decimal System was good, and sank back from the books to gather under a chandelier at the reception desk.

The Exorcists watched with reverence and distrust as it formed into a hovering green sphere, before Kanda snatched it unceremoniously from the air and deposited the treasure in his coat pocket.

Mia yawned. Lenalee admired their work with content. Grimstad was snoring somewhere near the psychology section.

Even though each were lost in their own thoughts and dreams, they reacted as a whole to the slow tap of footsteps on the roof of the library. There was a sudden thud on the ceiling that shook the room, but they were already poised with weapons and the finders reacted just as fast setting up their talismans.

Mia activated her Innocence, leaving her body under the reception table and opened her eyes into an impossible flood of colour. The sky was a burning, bright pink, brighter than any limelight. Chains clanked amidst the laughter of the demons.

"Above, hundreds," she threw to Kanda and Lenalee, already floating quickly off the ground. Her next thought was a wish that the library would survive. They had to draw them off somehow, away from the Finders, or any civilians. _Ha, in the middle of the city._

She could only go about 500 meters away from her body. This would not be enough to cross Paris, but enough to get them to the university gardens, which would hopefully be empty at this hour. That is, if the Akuma would even follow. Lenalee and Kanda left the building and dissappeared into the cloud of monsters, and Mia admired how composed they looked compared to how she felt. It was like they'd been doing this for so long that a hundred or so demons couldn't faze them anymore. The Finders organised themselves on the ground like sitting ducks.

* * *

Mia gritted her teeth, ducking under a razor sharp crescent bullet and letting it slice through her hair without doing much harm. She somersaulted on a whim and landed on the offending Akuma, slamming her axe into it's neck which shattered with a satisfying clink, the bewildered soul soaring off with it's reclaimed freedom.

The akuma seemed reluctant to move; their target was the library, not the exorcists; they seemed to be unaware that the Innocence was already claimed. Informing them would make Kanda a target, but it could save what was left of the library…

 _No, no, no, no, what the hell is wrong with you Mia, he's still a person._

The next bullet caught her arm, sinking through with minimal damage that was quickly fixed by a weave of shining white thread. Human souls were indestructible only until Dark Matter was involved.

For the first few months of her joyles existance as an Exorcist, Mia attempted to justify her suffering by remembering the souls that she freed from the Earl's clutches. Hypothetically saving living people from monsters wasn't obviously effective day-to-day, so the magnified salvation of individual Akuma souls seemed like something she could be content with.

It wasn't.

Not even when she realized that one of those souls could have been, for example, Friedrich Gauss'. He could hardly publish papers from beyond the grave, so it wasn't motivation enough.

Mia failed to see how a person like her even deserved to live.

Another soul untethered from a monster, and another, and another, all wrongly assuming that she appreciated their gratitude. It wasn't like she could hear them over the screaming of dying Finders below.

* * *

By the time the attack began to thin the building was already in pieces. Sparks flew as the new electric wires snapped, setting fires to the books that weren't already burning. There was a demon somewhere up there dumping flammable liquid onto the ground and it covered the stones like rain, making what remained of the library a literal hell.

Someone was trying to drag her body out of the chaos. They would probably die, but Finders were like that.

The reception table was still standing somewhat; it had been nailed to the floor and withstood a bookshelf having fallen against it but even the thick dark wood was starting to shrivel and smoke boiled dangerously close over the ground. She crawled out of the wooden tent, helped by a Finder .

Of course no-one would have to risk their lives if only she'd left her body somewhere sensible, but she had naively believed that the library would still be standing when everything was over.

She couldn't even identify the Finder who was trying to save her, their body disintegrated into stars too soon, and the dust quickly caught fire. Gasping in a lungful of smoke, Mia raised her hands to cover her face before it exploded but instead felt herself hauled into the air by her arms.

Lenalee dropped her into the relative safety of a lawn and snuffed out the fire from her uniform and hair while Mia attempted to choke her lungs clean and breathe at the same time. Only when she was sure that she'd live did she wonder how it was that she still wanted to, when the smoke caught in her hair had once been a person.

* * *

Four hours later, the city was dark and empty of pink fire and the Exorcists learned that the University wasn't the only location that had been visited by an army.

The Earl had led a coordinated attack on almost all of the Exorcist teams, succeeding in killing two Exorcists, adding to the 68 Finders and eighteen civilians who were also lost. Dove Yarm, one of the scientists from HQ, had been out on an investigative mission and returned without a head. Grimstad was probably one of the many unidentified corpses that had burned with the library because they collected a jar of ashes from the ruins and poured it into a coffin bearing his name. Mia knew because she'd sneaked off from the depressingly empty Finders' House that was used as a makeshift infirmary to watch them prepare the dead for shipping to HQ. They'd be burned again there, symbolically.

She felt sick at how grotesque it was that a human being could turn into a pile of ashes in the space of a few hours.

No-one spoke on the train back. Lenalee looked just about ready to die and Kanda was solemn as usual, which made her think that he had been grieving already. Perpetually in mourning. Yes, Kanda was a widow, she decided, and if this was what Kanda felt like all the time then she wasn't ever going to be mean and impatient with him again.

Mia was horrified at the knowledge that she'd see this kind of tragedy more often in the future, so she lay curled up on her seat and hoped to be as small as possible. Maybe if she was small enough the world would just ignore her and stop showing her atrocities, like a five-year-old trying to get attention.

Olivia called but Mia couldn't think of what to say that would be comforting. Not only was Yarm's death a wake-up call to the Scientists that they were also in danger, but Olivia had worked in the same team as him for the last few months. Her loss was greater, but Mia couldn't even get past her own fear of loosing a friend. _I am a selfish, despicable excuse for a human being._

Her soul was just about held together by her bones. If she activated her Innocence now she'd most likely fall apart. For a moment, it seemed like the simplest way out. _It would be better for everyone in the long run._

She wondered if it would hurt more than continually wondering why they never found out more than Grimstad's given name. He gave his life to save humanity (she didn't even bother pretending that it was any of them he'd been saving) and she didn't ever ask where he was from.

How many more of those people were there?


	5. Only So Many Hours Of Sunlight

Ok, right, I should have informed you at the start, but this story is set a few years before Allen joined the Order. I don't actually know why, but I trust past me knew what she was doing. It might have something to do with Lavi having joined right about then but who knows.

* * *

Remember people. Asymmetric.

* * *

Lenalee departed the medical ward as soon as the dead arrived, a nurse hurrying after her with an IV. Mia was jealous of her ability to cry and sleep, even _if_ the girl woke screaming from nightmares in the early hours.

Apart from that, she felt nothing but a desire to not be here, or anywhere for that matter. She was tired of existing, not knowing how to express her sympathy towards Olivia. Sympathy was such a stupid feeling, she realized, just helplessness dressed up in emotions.

* * *

Mia crept down to breakfast three days later, at an hour when she knew nobody would be in the hall but silent insomniac grievers. She went in her pyjamas because it still seemed too much effort to dress, and she'd be going back to hide in her room anyway.

Olivia had been bringing her food up to her room for the last two days - because she understood that Mia wasn't prepared to actively ensure her survival, and apparently it was good for you to have something to look after - but Mia was starting to feel like an invalid and felt bad about stealing Olivia away from the Science Division.

There were five people in the hall; three Finders and what looked like two travellers whom she'd never met, murmuring quietly to each other. An old man and a boy a little older than her whose hair immediately caught her attention.

Olivia had said there were two new Exorcists around. I-have-no-name-but-you-may-call-me-Bookman and his apprentice, Lavi. Mia watched them curiously as she waited for Jerry to finish a chapter of a book, until the boy noticed her staring and she shot him a glare before turning away. It wasn't meant to be offensive, her face just had a habit of being awful. She heard him chuckle which was enough to send him immediately onto the ignore-do-not-engage list.

"Mia!" Jerry exclaimed far too loudly into the almost empty hall. She winced at both the sound and his overwhelmingly cool presence. "No need to always be so polite you know! Just shout when you need me!"

"Good morning," she tried to smile but his exclamation marks were something she just couldn't get used to. She was already regretting coming here. Maybe Jerry managed to be cheerful because he'd been here long enough to see plenty of mass funerals and figured out how to deal with them.

"It's good to see you, darling, what would you like?"

Mia felt like she was too soulless for this place. The tall columns and empty corridors suited her but not this good-hearted amazing creature standing before her. It was people who made the Order a home and it was people she couldn't stand to be near.

"Just, I don't know, pancakes or something," she managed to mutter. She wasn't hungry at all, but if she didn't eat Olivia would find out and bring her food again.

"I've got blueberries today especially for you! Be ready in a minute sweetie."

This must have been Olivia's doing. Shame she didn't mention to him not to call her _sweetie_ as well, but the blueberries made up for it somewhat. Mia forced another smile and sat on the floor to wait as the cook magically produced pancakes from scratch. She was pretty sure that what Jerry did was sorcery, but was too afraid of offending him to ask.

She placed her hands over her ears and tried to ignore the whispers from the other side of the room where the Bookmen sat. Then she pushed her knees under her chin and pretended that she was invisible until Jerry called out that her breakfast was ready.

* * *

It was blissfully quiet after the two new Exorcists left. She ate with her eyes closed, poking at the plate until her fork happened upon a blueberry, waiting for her appetite to come back so she could actually enjoy the lovingly prepared food. It was like eating sympathy, which she liked the sound of.

"Hey," she heard a voice and assumed incorrectly that it wasn't directed at her. When he said it again she reluctantly opened her eyes, unable to pretend that the person wasn't right in front of her. Squinting at the bright electric lights she saw red hair and an eye patch. He was leaning one fist on his cheek, the other hand lying flat on the table like he was inviting her to stab it with her fork.

Mia felt very impressed with herself for resisting the impulse.

"What do you want?" She asked, trying and failing to make the phrase sound polite. When she was about ten her parents employed a tutor to teach her and Ethel how to behave in society, but Edith had ignored most of those lessons.

"Just saying hi." He probably thought his smile was friendly, but he seemed to have forgotten that 71 Order members had been massacred three days ago.

"Right." She looked at her mangled pancakes and started eating them aggressively. Lavi watched her with barely-hidden amusement. How on Earth he could find this funny was beyond her.

"So what's your name?"

 _Please just leave me alone,_ she prayed silently. She couldn't even taste the pancakes, there were too many other things fighting for attention in her head.

"Will you go away if I tell you?"

"Oh come on," he rolled his eyes for no reason that she could discern.

"No," Mia lowered her voice to a snarl, "seriously."

He was about to move his hand off the table so she made a move for it and fortunately for the both of them missed. Her fork remained lodged in the surface, but she pulled it out as soon as she saw that Olivia had walked through the doors.

She gave Lavi her friendliest smile and continued to eat, pretending that Olivia's entrance went unnoticed. His face was reduced to a blank stare, his hands frozen in midair, which she felt much more comfortable with. By the time Olivia approached them he still hadn't decided what to say.

"Whoa, you're making friends." She took a seat next to Mia and stole a blueberry, keeping her face bereft of true emotion.

"I am!" Mia said unnaturally brightly, "it's so much fun!"

Olivia had covered the dark red rings under her eyes with makeup, but she doubted anyone else noticed.

"Yo, Olive," Lavi said. Mia hissed inwardly at how he was already shortening her name, but she just gave Olivia a hug without saying a word. Her friend had spent hours listening to the casuality reports flooding in, waiting for names that she recognised. Mia couldn't even imagine what that felt like.

"He's going leave now, Mia," Olivia sighed, patting her head. She must have given Lavi one of her meaningful looks because Mia heard his bench slide across the floor in the next second. Olivia's glances were so effective they could be weaponized.

"See ya," the boy said, still friendly as hell. Olivia's voice was minimally polite when she wished him farewell and Mia wondered what she'd done to deserve a friend so brilliant.

"Thanks," she said into her labcoat, "God, he's going to be irritating."

"Only until Kanda hacks his head off."

Mia smiled as she felt tears finally slide through her eyelids and sink into her friend's shoulder. The sting in her eyes was welcome like rain after a draught because she finally felt an emotion that wasn't anger. She thought about Grimstad, who gave up his life, and Yarm, who probably thought his job was fairly safe, and then she thought of Lenalee, Kanda and all the other Exorcists who never got to choose and the tears just kept on coming until the lump in her throat unravelled.

"Olivia?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry I forgot to get those pretty shoes for you."

* * *

Lavi sat at Lenalee's table every day they were both there, stalkerishly aligning his mealtimes with her's. This was fine because he wasn't a hundred percent jerk when she was around and Lenalee needed someone her age who was capable of laughing to keep her from losing it. Mia missed the comfortable silences they used to share at lunch, but it was surprisingly easy to drown out Lavi's chatter once she got used to the frequency. Bookman was the quiet type, always reading newspapers from various corners of the Earth; he was an isolated point of solitude among the endless noise of young people trying to ignore the death that surrounded them. Bookman didn't pretend to be of sound mind.


	6. Musikverein

First, I can't find ticket prices for trains in the late 19th Century with a quick google search and I shudder at the thought of digging through history books.

Second, I don't own DGM, and I do not own The Idiot either, those belong to their respective authors. Also... I have not actually read The Idiot (yet), which is where that horribly out of context quote is from (though I have read Crime and Punishment… I feel like Mia would relate to Raskolnikov way too much, hahaha, and Lenalee would probably burn the book). It's probably from a more recent translation than Mia would have had access to, but I feel like from all the authors from before the 20th century that I've read (a total of like, three), Mia would enjoy Dostoevsky the most so I'm just ignoring historical facts for the purposes of the story.

* * *

Closed trajectory. This is me not giving up.

* * *

Mia spent the next day wondering around the order in circles, because grief was a stable limit cycle. Komui informed her that she'd be put back in the field in two days but it was actually a relief. She had nothing to do at HQ except be too empty to even miss her unreachable future and she was starting to feel too comfortable wearing only pyjamas. People were starting to give her weird looks. Weird _er_ looks.

Someone had left a few maths books in her room, which only made her cry because there was no point. She had once believed that it was entirely possible for her to transition from reading papers to writing them, to stack on that elaborate mountain of mathematics she envisioned whenever she tried to picture the subject as a whole. Calculus, then analysis climbed alongside geometry – their complexity increased the further up you went. On the other hand, it was neighboured by algebra which gave birth to set theory and whose roots dipped below the surface of numbers and became the flawless foundations that the whole universe rested on. With enough time, she thought, she could understand all of it.

She couldn't sleep during the night because the silence reminded her of the dead and she wanted to feel alive, so she walked, methodically starting at the highest level she could get to. There was a surprising number of disused rooms; it seemed like the order had optimistically built this place hoping for a grander army and a bustling atmosphere. Instead there was just a deathly quiet of abandonment.

Mia clattered past the empty rooms on the second floor on a skateboard that Olivia had acquired for her. The one she found had perished in the fire but she managed to salvage a couple of screws and exchanged them in the new one. It was the least she could do for the child who left it behind.

There were a few steps in the middle of the second central corridor, compensating for the fact that the dodecagonal floor had been built with a tilt. Mia considered it for a moment, but eventually dismissed the question to the list of unanswered mysteries surrounding The Black Order. She started facing away from the top of the steps standing on the board and found herself moving, until she reached the bottom stair. Then she climbed the steps and this time pushed off the floor with her back foot to increase her speed. The curve of the polygon was just large enough to let her adjust her course without the need of a pivot so she accelerated easily.

She lifted off the ground just before the bottom step and landed on the top with the wheels still spinning.

* * *

Returning to her room she couldn't feel her feet but her ability to feel emotions was back in full force, and she wished she could chain it down to keep it in her head forever. _God, this is marvellous._ Sometimes she forgot where she was and actually felt happy.

Some two hundred metres from her room, a sound caught her attention. It was a high-pitched melodic wailing, and with the nostalgia she began to feel there came melancholy. The tune was associated with bright yellow lights and the quiet shuffling of two thousand people sitting in place, but this time it just echoed unevenly through empty corridors.

Mia found the source to be a door and crept up as close as the dared to it. A lonely violin playing a concerto was beyond it and a soft tap of a foot marking a tempo. Mia smiled and sat by the door to listen to it awhile.

She woke for a few seconds to find herself swaying above the floor carried by some stranger, but sleep was too precious to lose worrying about it.

* * *

It was a strange feeling, missing the sunrise. Mia got used to watching it through the tall HQ windows on the top floor, anticipating wakefulness. This time, the sun was already filtering through her stained glass windows, painting an image of a saint with it's light that her carpet distorted. Mia looked at it waiting for her eyes to stop hurting.

She found Olivia curled up sleeping on her couch with a thick notebook between her face and a cushion. Mia crept up to her to drape a blanket over her shoulders, took a bath, and then finally changed into some day clothes.

God, they were uncomfortable. She hadn't worn a dress for about half a year and they were one of the reasons why she hated going out. It cost her twenty-eight minutes and a lot of her reserved patience to make sense of it, corset and everything, but the ritual would enable her to blend in effortlessly with the London masses. She pinned up her hair and covered most of it with a relatively unfashionable wide-brimmed hat, then grabbed a handbag and stuffed a couple of knives in, as well as her revolver.

Her attempt at sneaking out without anyone seeing her was thwarted by the ginger guy. Mia saw him at the end of the corridor strolling her way but it was already too late to turn back because that would be retreating. She could pretend she forgot something before he recognized her, but honestly, she just wanted to get out.

 _Just walk past, walk past you stupid, stupid_ _red-head,_ she prayed, but he slowed as she approached and undaunted by her disinviting expression he turned on his heel and started walking in the same direction as her.

"Afternoon, PJs." Lavi smiled at her, speaking German. Mia gritted her teeth and took a deep breath.

"Afternoon, eyepatch," she said. She hadn't meant it to be funny, and could think of no reason why it would be, but he laughed. His laugh was a hundred times more annoying than his voice, and Lavi seemed to love the sound of it.

"It's Lavi, which reminds me… we're still not past introductions." He spun to walk backwards a couple of steps in front of her and stretched out a hand. She ignored it, gripping her skirt to keep it off the dusty floor. Her combat boots clanked on stone.

"Come _on_ , I just washed my hands like five minutes ago," he waved the hand in front of her face. It was like he was _trying_ to be repulsive.

She was angry at how well he spoke German, because she'd also heard him speak perfect Chinese, Turkish, and English to various members of the Order and honestly it was starting to seem like he knew _all_ the languages. He'd also started to match her Austrian accent which was more than a little disturbing.

"Get out of my way," Mia told him calmly, and he, _surprise surprise_ , grinned. He spun back round so he was walking beside her, which - she had to admit - was at least compliant. _I'm going to kill him if he gives me one more reason,_ Mia promised herself _._

"You get along with Yuu, don't ya." He had a habit of stating things instead of asking them. Apart from that, well, green eyes and impressive hair.

"Not really," _not enough to call him Yuu._

"Figures, but I'm sure you two are destined to be friends. Oh, you _are_ friends with Olive, right, could you put in a good word for me? She's cute but-"

 _Yes, that's all I need for motive._

"Don't call her Olive."

"Sure, but will you-"

"No! For god's sake, leave me alone." Mia hit a button for the lift and crossed her arms. It occurred to her that she could murder him now because it would be easy to drop the body down the shaft. Or she could just push him off before the lift got there.

"Okay. Hey, where are you going anyways?"

If only she had the strength to prize the safety gate open…

"London." She told him just in case the Order thought she'd ran away. "Could you do something for me?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Could you-" She felt a crushing disappointment as the elevator cranked to a stop before them and the gates opened. "Shit, never mind."

"Are you sure? What was it?"

She sighed, walking into the death trap and angrily hitting the button for the exit tunnels. He followed her inside.

"London, huh? Can I come with? I have the map memorized, I could be useful," Lavi offered.

"Why, did you live here?" Mia found herself asking, and immediately realized that she didn't care what the answer actually was. She just needed to not hear his voice for a few seconds so she interrupted him.

"Nope. We're vagabonds, y'see. I know the way around all the major cities."

She was surprised that when he said this it wasn't bragging but rather an empty fact. On the other hand, she wouldn't have minded bragging because this was way more creepy.

"Is that because of you being, uh, what was it, a Bookman?"

"Yeah," he nodded dismissively, and an awkward silence fell. Mia revelled in it.

 _Ah, so there is a subject he won't talk about. Maybe I can get rid of him that way, and find out why I shouldn't trust him as well, this is a plan._ Mia uncrossed her arms and let them hang by her sides. Someone had told her once that it made people more trusting to hold your palms facing out but that would just feel silly.

"What does a Bookman do?" It was difficult, but she looked him in the eye.

"Record history," he summarized crisply, with a faraway look that signified there was more to it than would fit in her head. Mia saw him take a breath to change the subject so she pressed on,

"Yeah, but… what makes you different to any other chronicler?" She continued staring at his one eye when she asked, to make sure that he took her seriously. "Why is there a secretive clan?"

Lavi fidgeted slightly and shrugged, then took a nanosecond to reset his face into a grin and leaned nonchalantly on a handrail. Mia observed him with that curiosity he seemed to find inconvenient.

"What-cha planning on doing in London?" He asked cheerfully, ridiculously expecting Mia to politely go along with it. She laughed spitefully at his attempt.

"You're creepy as hell," Mia loved telling the truth when she could insult someone with it, "go back to whence you came from."

* * *

She bought a first-class ticket at the station with half a month's worth of her wages, and felt no emotion at seeing the scenery roll by. Being the fastest mode of transport available, Exorcists were very familiar with trains, but very rarely was there not a mission or HQ at the journey's end. She used to enjoy travelling, but nowadays it just meant more demons.

The surprising thing was that the Science Division hadn't teamed up with the Sorcerers to create some other, faster means of travel. They were definitely inventive enough to figure out how to build flying machines and the only reason why they shouldn't would be to keep the Order secret.

She'd taken apart her Golem several times trying to figure out how Sorcery was involved in it's mechanics, but they tended to self-destruct if she dug too far. Olivia was a data analyst, too far from engineering to even glimpse their creation, but she promised that Mia would be the first to know if she figured it out.

 _Speaking of,_ she thought, switching off her Golem because it was seriously not okay that it's tracker was always activated. It was the eleventh they gave her after she destroyed the others out of boredom. Eventually she would feel bad for giving the Science Division more work, but right now she couldn't care less about their troubles and it was nothing compared to how many Daisya went through.

* * *

London was smaller than she remembered, drowned in people and carts, but her favourite tearoom was still quite empty, as it was early afternoon when she arrived. It was decorated with various shades of tulips, but the aroma was solely that of well-brewed tea and cake. She took in lungfulls of it when the waitress showed her to a table and left her with a menu she didn't thank for because she was too busy breathing.

The table was generously sized, perfect for a book and several cups and teapots, and the seat was soft enough to allow one to curl up and fall asleep. Mia sat still for a while, thinking about how absurd it was to travel a hundred and fifty miles just for a cup of tea. Nevertheless, this was her life now, these tiny moments of solitude away from anyone that might remind her that she possessed long-term memory.

She opened a novel and leant it against the table, flipping through the pages to find any words that caught her attention. Lenalee had recommended it before the Paris fiasco, and though Mia would have never touched a novel before Lenalee seemed like a person she could trust when it came to books.

" _It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise."_ It was underlined in ink, with stars drawn on the margin around it.

Mia just stared at it, because she started to suspect that Lenalee had some complicated reason in recommending this particular text. _I have to be wary of this book, lest it try to teach me something other than maths._

She ordered a fancily named Ceylon and turned back to the front page.


	7. Arbitrary Location

I do not own DGM.

Trigger warnings!

* * *

Optimism is for wonderful people and thieves.

* * *

When Komui handed her the next mission summary, he also handed her a cat. A kitten, to be exact; a tiny furry thing that constantly moved and immediately attacked her hair.

"Aaah…‽" It scrambled out of her arms, leaving scratches on her hands and leaping hopefully for the closed door. Komui yelled and ran after the menace, stopping suddenly as the handle rotated and Lenalee pushed the door open with a tray. Nimbly sidestepping the kitten, she smiled obliviously and said,

"Hi, brother, I have that report from Reever you were waiting for."

Komui was faced with an impossible choice; his precious sister carrying precious data and coffee, and chasing a horrific hairy creature which just dashed past the science division. It would have even won it's freedom if some sleep deprived soul hadn't noticed the opportunity to take a break from work.

"Thanks Lenalee!" Komui turned to his sister, leaving the cat unexplained. He took the folder of data and flipped through, his expression annoying as always but neutral. Lenale collected his empty coffee mug and left, glancing at Mia inexplicably sadly.

 _Are we doomed yet?_ Mia thought, wondering if the report was related to the attacks two weeks ago. A lot of people died, but hundreds more Akuma had been destroyed, so were they counting it as a win? Were they dissapointed with how easily Exorcists could die?

 _What's the estimate on the number of Akuma in the world? They have pretty precise numbers on the rates of Akuma destruction, but what about creation? How would you even go about estimating that?_

 _Say it takes fifteen minutes to create an Akuma. If the Earl works non-stop, and takes on average fifteen minutes to travel through some kind of magical means, the mechanics of which are unrelated, that would give a rate of about 1440 Akuma per month._

 _If an average exorcist kills twenty Akuma per mission, and does two missions per month, with there being 16 active Exorcists (excluding Hevlaska) that is… 640 Akuma per month._

 _Not a reason for panic, since the Earl does **not** work night and day creating Akuma, so I could safely assume a maximum ten hour factory work day, with all the scheming, managing and searching it has to do in the other fourteen, this gives 600 Akuma per month._

 _Since these are only rough estimates the numbers are pretty even._

 _The conclusion is that this war will never end. Not unless either the Order or the Earl significantly up their game._

She looked sharply at the scientist. What did the real numbers look like? The Generals possibly destroyed more than fourty monsters per month, but she doubted that the others did. Akuma were pretty difficult to track down.

She didn't have enough data. Mia needed precise numbers. She _wanted_ precise numbers. She'd been jealous of the Scientists ever since she joined the Order, but never felt this desperate to not be a vessel for destructive power.

Mia was about to start estimating the number of Akuma in the world at any given time, _t_ , when a dishevelled scientist staggered in, kitten in hand.

"It doesn't have a name yet," Komui explained - or rather he thought he was explaining. "I thought I'd leave that to you."

"It? What is _it_? Why?" She held it at arm's length to keep it from choking itself on her tangled curls. It was grey, striped with a lighter shade. She made a disgusted sound at it but the kitten reacted with an adorable _meow_ and continued staring at her with an intelligence that was just out of reach _._

"It's a _Felis catus_ , mammal from the _felidae_ family… i.e. a cat? Johnny rescued it yesterday – you know how soft-hearted he can be – but none of the scientists have the time, so I thought I'd give it to you."

 _Because I_ do _have the time? What the fuck?_

Mia watched Komui suspiciously, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She moved her eyes to the mission summary lying next to her feet but before she could inspect it, the Supervisor spoke.

"You're aware that Azhar and Carlos were killed in North America," he started, in a different tone.

 _I'm being moved._ Her heartbeat quickened in a mixture of anxiety and denial.

"The Grand Generals decided that it is necessary to replace them and specified that you would be-"

"You're relocating me?"

The kitten squirmed in her hands, choking. Komui adjusted his glasses and looked away.

"Yes."

She let go of the cat, but with the door shut it had no-where to escape to.

"… just me?"

"General Sokaro is already on the continent for an extended mission. America is less populated by Akuma than the others, we can't afford to send anyone else with you."

 _Why me?_

"Is Olivia-"

"No. I'm sorry, Mia."

* * *

Mia wondered if it was a punishment for not getting along with the other Exorcists. She also wondered if they thought that a cat could replace her best friend, and how a bunch of highly intelligent decision-makers could be so shit at psychology. She was going to die without Olivia. Her heart was going to shrivel and eventually she'd loop the useless arteries around her neck…

 _That would teach them._

When she saw Lenalee in the library, Mia cursed her feelings for tricking her into thinking that she wanted to be in a lonely and quiet place. It was illogical because soon, being alone would be her only state of being. She should have seen through the deception but was far too anxious for self-analysis.

Lenalee smiled with obvious difficulty, holding a couple of books in hands that were still decorated with partly healed scrapes.

"We'll miss you here," she helpfully informed Mia.

Mia kicked a bookshelf to indicate that it was a long shot. _Who the heck_ _would miss an ugly thing like me, why are you a liar?_ Lenalee continued to look determined, and Mia made her way through to a cushioned bench waiting for her to give up. The spines of books around her were stationary and she watched them in their unrelenting lifelessness, falling sideways into embroidery.

"It's not that bleak, Mia, they move Exorcists around all the time."

"Until they don't."

"They'll send you back once a local shows up. Statistically-"

"No, Lenalee, they're sending me away because they want me out of here."

Lenalee ceased smiling and looked around as if searching for something. She set aside the reference books she'd been collecting on one of the tables and said, distractedly, "that's not even true."

Mia curiously watched her climb a ladder in high heels with impeccable grace and wondered if Lenalee would still manage to look so flawless if she knocked it over.

"Here," she returned safely to the ground and handed a book to Mia. _An Introduction to Differential Geometry._ "Keep it until you're back."

Mia stared at the title, feeling like she didn't deserve this gesture. How could Lenalee be so amazing and love the Order at the same time? It made no sense. It made no sense that she was still bothering to talk to Mia at all.

Mia could never know everything, but she decided that it would be okay right now just to know as much as possible given the circumstances. It was what Lenalee was doing; she could never have a normal happy life so she did what she could to make the HQ a home – weird and imperfect but containing a family.

"Lenalee?" Mia started, but her breath hitched on fear and uncertainty so she had to fight with her voice to finish, "Lenalee, would you like to start a maths club when I'm back?"

Lenalee looked alarmed but Mia continued, "the Science Division isn't allowed to study pure maths, but they can't extend that to Exorcists. Can they?"

* * *

Olivia dragged her away from the library after Lenalee went back to work. They sat down on the square platform of the central lift with a picnic blanket and three boxes of baklava, like they used to when massacres and relocations weren't something they worried about.

 _We should have worried,_ Mia thought, _I knew this gig wasn't going to be joyful, but I never suspected it could become this._

"I asked Lenalee if she wanted to start a maths club," Mia broke the silence, hoping for someone to approve of her decision. Olivia stopped chewing and swallowed quickly.

"That's… whoa, Mia," she said, then smiled and winked, "and there I thought I'd always have you all to myself. I'm proud of you."

"Thanks." Mia was proud of herself too. "Of course it's not going to happen unless they send me back before I die."

Olivia gave her a level look and shook her head, "if you die I'll become a sorceress and bring you back just so you can face Lenalee's wrath."

Mia chewed a sweet for a while so she wouldn't have to speak. Olivia poured them some tea, brewed with leaves that Mia brought back from London. She'd given all her savings to the tearoom for a tin of their Ceylon, knowig full well that no-one at the Order could brew them perfectly.

Still, it was better than any tea that Jerry had ever made and that was a lot.

"Just don't give up Mia," Olivia looked her in the eye and continued in an uncharacteristically serious tone of voice, "you do that sometimes, you know? Give up on everything… and you've always come back but I'm worried that one day you're going to do something incredibly stupid and then you won't…"

Mia didn't break eye contact but she knew she'd be lying if she promised anything. She didn't want to lie, so maybe there was another way; a change of perspective.

 _I don't give up on maths. If I treat this as I would a maths problem, then I con't give up on principle._

"I'm going to pour my whole heart into not giving up." Mia told her, and wiped her hands on a napkin to get the honey off of it. " _There's always hope_ , you said, and I'll be damned before I doubt a Mathematician's words."

Olivia grinned at her title, turning her eyes back into the darkness surrounding the elevator shaft. Mia picked the prettiest knife she had in her pockets and ran it down her right palm, then handed it to Olivia.

"I promise you that I'm going to come back," she said, watching as blood pooled in her hand before letting it drip down to the void below, "and you promise me that you'll be here when I do."

Her grin broadening, Olivia took the knife and carefully carved a line through her skin then took Mia's hand and shook it,

"I promise that I'll be here when you come back."


	8. Not A Perfect Geodesic

I do not own DGM.

This is just a brief emotional infodump. I'm sorry, I don't know how else to write travel. I've named so many characters Evariste it's not even funny.

* * *

You should have solved this by throwing matches into the dust.

* * *

The ship was called Doomsday, or that's what it should have been called.

She gave Olivia a cold stare, and Olivia returned it and began to cry. Mia looked away and swallowed, searching for a lump in her throat and finding nothing. Unable to figure out why she couldn't cry when it was most important, Mia just hugged her friend to hide her emotionless face.

"You're going to be alright, Mia."

Mia felt nothing. Maybe Olivia wasn't this precious to her after all, if the creaking of the ship could not even induce tears. Emptiness isn't equal to sorrow.

"You have to try to be happy, wherever you are."

If it was anyone else saying this, Mia would have murdered them. Right now though she was just worried that Olivia was going to see her face and find out how little she could bring herself to care when saying goodbye.

* * *

Mia went straight to her cabin when the ship swung smoothly away from the port. She locked the door and sat, banging her head slowly against the wood until the kitten started crying and pawing at her hand. The self inflicted injury still stung a little, because they'd been too scared to go to the Infirmary and face the Head Nurse to get it properly looked after.

Mia waved her hand around and watched her pet follow it curiously with its giant blueish eyes, until it lifted both it's paws attempting to embrace it, claws out.

She laughed hysterically at how much she hated her life.

* * *

She named the cat Evariste, after the unfortunate mathematician that died in his early twenties. Ev, for short. Evariste Galois when she wanted to sound pretentious.

Ev was made to listen to Mia incomprehensibly reading a bunch of group theory papers she'd stolen from the Order because she wanted to make sure that he deserved his name. Evariste Galois had the unfortunate kind of personality that led to failing exams, getting involved in the revolution, spending a few years in jail, and after all that dying in a stupid duel, possibly over some woman. The night before the duel, knowing he had no chance of survival, he scribbled down pages and pages of maths that he'd been working on in his head, feverishly trying to save a fraction of his brain from being taken away by death. _I have no time,_ he wrote.

Mia hated the story almost as much as she loved it.

 _It would be so fitting_ , she thought, _if I survived this war and then tripped and broke my neck down some stairwell. They would laugh about it for years._

* * *

By the time the ship hit the North American port Mia had decided that the best she could do was survive, and the only way to do that was if she shelved her feelings in the darkest corner of her train of thought. She couldn't regret that decision, because regret was a feeling itself.

She would reach her mission destination prior to reporting at the North American Branch, and a Finder had been sent to meet her at the docks. She watched her luggage being unloaded and then loaded into a freight train and waved goodbye to it before following the Finder to another platform and handing Ev to a nervous-looking official who took it to a second train. The third would be the one she was ordered to take.

Sitting in the compartment with the Finder she tried to remember his name. It must not have registered when he'd said it and she felt like it would upset him if she asked.

He was young, which made her wonder what his pretty face would look like when he died. _Will they have to search through rubble for his limbs? Or will they just scoop a handful of ash into a jar?_

Mia hadn't believed in the afterlife before she found out that Akuma used human souls. She hadn't been scared of disappearing at the end mostly because her naïve mind could not take death seriously back then. Even being grown up was mostly unimaginable.

She was terrified now that death would be a pitch black void, with nothing to see or hear or feel, just a pointless never-ending existance. She would rather just disappear and she probably would. Her soul was usually more damaged than her body after a fight, as even though it healed faster than flesh sometimes the injuries piled up and left her a mess of tangled strings.


	9. Squaring Inequalities

I do not own DGM.

I seem to have misplaced the plot, by which I mean the plot had never existed in the first place. I know how it's going to end, now lets see how long I can keep this going. Warning: this and the next three or four chapters do not feature any (main) DGM characters. See ya after exams.

* * *

Remember people.

* * *

There was a blessed painting in this village church that reportedly talked, and not only that, but it talked with sense and gave out advice on how to be a good Christian. Naturally, people from all corners of nowhere gathered to worship it, kicking up the dry dust of a rarely used square.

A priest let Mia and her Finder guide through a side door, nervously glancing at the cross on her chest. Someone had sent an inquiry addressed from the Vatican funded Black Order to the place and it had mentioned that an Apostle of God would be coming to investigate. Say what you will about the Black Order but it really knew how to intimidate people.

God knows what the guy must have thought when he saw her bare knees and unruly hair.

Mia ordered the church cleared of all people, including the guards, knowing that Akuma would soon start to gather, then congratulated herself on how much she cared. Only following rules though – Exorcists had to, first and foremost, minimize the civilian casualties to make the creation of new Demons less likely. It was all very clinical and required no emotional attachment to humanity.

While the building was emptied, and a perimeter of Finders set up around it, Mia approached the painting. Only the parish priest was there, probably to make sure she didn't destroy anything, and the Finder who seemed immediately attached to the place. He picked the only other painting and knelt before it. Mia sniggered in his direction then turned her attention to the actual magic.

It was an angel carrying a sword, painted in rather neutral colours for such a dangerous looking creature, with a sunrise behind the cloud it was standing on. It was looking down at her with narrowed eyes and she figured that sword was likely to behead her if it ever broke free of two dimensions.

"Belief is everything." It told her. _Advice huh?_ The priest next to her jotted the words down in a notebook, but she'd done enough sniggering for the day.

"You're made of Innocence, right?" She asked out of politeness.

"And _you_ are not."

Mia bared her teeth in an ugly laugh and the angel swung it's sword out in answer.

"You really can't tell? Or do you work for a different God?" _You're just a splash of paint on a dead plant._

The painting hesitated, and then it's face seemed to reset.

"Belief is everything," it repeated.

 _Oh,_ she realized with disappointment, _it's not actually intelligent._ Mia found a machete in her backpack and unwrapped the cloth around it. There were, in general, two ways of collecting Innocence: one – make it believe that it's finished whatever job it had set out to do, and two – destroy it's host object. Mia preferred the latter, unless it was a library.

She swung the weapon in a forehand motion, or would have if something hadn't crashed into her, sending her stumbling sideways into the floor. She dropped the machete to fall on her hands then turned and pushed off the ground fist first at whatever had attacked.

It was the priest, whom her fist never reached because the nameless Finder caught it and twisted her hand out with the momentum. She refused to fall over again and he let her wrist go before the joint could dislocate.

 _Fucking_ nice _people._

"What is _wrong_ with you?"

They were both struck by different kinds of silence. The priest was shocked and abashed and the Finder, heaven help him, looked livid. Mia simmered inside.

"I'm sorry… but please d-don't…" the priest stuttered, then explained, "this painting… it had cost us a lot to get it here, the whole community came together…"

 _As if I care._

"Find another way," The Finder said. Normally she wouldn't have listened, but the guy was looking at her with an implication that if she destroyed the picture, she was a monster. And wasn't she trying not to be that? _What would Lenalee think? She'd probably cancel Maths Club… But doesn't Kanda do this shit all the time and get away with it?_

Mia didn't have enough good friends to risk losing one.

Wordlessly, she activated her Innocence, leaving her body to fall into a heap on the floor. She was extremely annoyed to see that the Finder caught it just in time and saved her the extra headache.

The painting was greyscale, which she had expected. It's frame shone with a slight green glow that distorted like water when she skimmed her hand through the pictured clouds. There was a sort of friction to it, pushing her soul away. Innocence was _weird._ If Ethel hadn't died, Mia would have been fascinated by the impossibility of it.

"Now you see?" she said to the angel, "I am a true Apostle of God. Give yourself up, if you want the world to survive."

It looked conflicted.

"You… are not… good."

True, her synchro rate was only fifty three percent, but this was just _offensive_ so she took a knife and ran it through the angel's throat. Slowly, maliciously pushing against it's power with the weight of her soul. The angel screamed and retreated to the furthest corner of it's cage, it's fear visible in how it's shoulders pushed at the boundary.

Mia had tried to accept being an Exorcist, she really tried and this creature just implied that she wasn't trying hard enough. If God had wanted a better Exorcist, it would have picked anyone else in the lecture theatre. It picked her because it wanted someone exactly like her and she trusted that God made smart decisions. _Selfish decisions, but smart._

The knife reached the frame and sank through into freedom and the grey-scale film shattered like glass. The pieces of it shot outwards, digging through her skin and disappearing immediately though turning, she saw the two men behind her flinch. There were tears in the priest's eyes. It wasn't physical pain you felt if your soul was hurt – it was an emotion that even adrenaline couldn't smother, a strange inexplicable despair.

"I'm sorry," she said, because no-one could hear her. The angel stilled.

* * *

The North American branch usually housed two Exorcists and General Sokaro Winters, who reported in from time to time; everyone just preferred to stay out of his way for their own safety. The other two died in the last attack, and now the whole continent was left to Mia, who couldn't care less, and the general, who was insane. She admired how badly the Black Order had organized it.

It would be late evening when they arrived, and the hours on the train were destined to be filled with endless silence. The still nameless Finder was impossible to read, and every time she caught his eye her guilt deepened until she wanted to die. The scenery outside was more forgiving, driving melancholy thoughts into her head and making her feel like she had reached the height of isolation. It stung her eyes to hope that anyone in the new branch would want to be friends with her.

 _Fucking hell, Mia, will you just stop with the emotions? You promised._

It was hard to pretend that she wasn't lonely.

 _Shelve it._

Olivia, the only living person that ever understood her, was literally on the other side of the planet, and even Olivia didn't know what it was like to be a weapon. Olivia hadn't been there to watch her sister turn to dust, desperately scraping at the stars on her skin with her nails. She didn't have that image of a helplessly frightened Ethel etched in her brain. Olivia could still remember her happily hugging textbooks.

"Here," she heard her companion say and turned to him. He was holding out a handkerchief and she took it hesitantly, realizing that there were tears running down her face.

"Thanks," she croaked barely audibly, then cleared her throat and said, "thank you."

Mia wiped her eyes, still embarrassingly not holding it together, begging the tears to stop because the Finder's expression was _patient_ which was her least favourite expression on anyone. He looked away politely as she desperately tried to tidy her face and her head.

"What's your name?" She asked eventually, immediately feeling better. She folded the square of expensive looking fabric and then ruffled in again, keeping it just in case.

"Nathanael," he said with a sigh. Mia felt only amazement at how simply she managed to solve a problem and fix a portion of her mental well-being. Maybe using words wasn't so pointless after all.

"Wow, biblical."

Nathanael smiled sadly. Unable to discern why, Mia was regretting having said anything and with every minute of subsequent silence she lost oceans of hope.

"My parents work at Central," he said after a while, unknowingly allowing her to breathe again, "they expected me to follow, so they named me appropriately. It's rather ridiculous."

Mia wanted to lie and let him know that she understood how awful that would be but she couldn't find the words. She just looked at him with what she hoped was an encouraging expression and thankfully he continued to speak in a low voice, facing the window.

"That place is awful, you know. They would have taken me because of my parents' influence, even though I failed every interview…"

"On purpose?" Mia asked, which earned her a smile.

"Not really. And all I had to do was be a better liar."

"And you weren't?"

Nathanael paused, reaching to his throat for a small silver cross hanging around his neck.

"' _You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour',_ " he quoted, "… I think once a Catholic organization stops following the most basic rules that God gave us then… well." The Finder withdrew into himself once again.

"So why," Mia prompted carefully, "are you here?"

"I… this… this is fine…" his eyelashes fluttered when he swallowed and his expression changed again. Mia couldn't keep up with the analysis because he spoke too fast. "I feel like at this level I can actually do something to help the world, you know? The branch chief never speaks in philosophies to justify anything, she just tells us where to go, gives us orders… and if it's in some far-off place, we decide how to carry them out on our own."

Mia was transfixed when he talked. Nathanael had a subtle, soft way of speaking that made everything he said sound beautiful, intensified by a voice that would surely be melodic if he wasn't so nervous. She had given up trying to read his face and just listened.

"Like how you stood up to me, despite the hierarchy."

"Yes." He smiled at her, so honestly that she doubted that any other smile she'd seen had been real. When his gaze shifted to meet her eyes, Nathanael must have seen how happy she was because he didn't say anything. Her first attempt at trying not to feel emotions had failed spectacularly.

 _I'll just try again tomorrow,_ she thought, _this is not too bad, considering._


	10. Vanish at Infinity

Now that I've finally failed all the exams, I can go back to posting all these chapters that had been written for like four months now. I hope you're all well. I was at my grandmothers last year and there was some village nearby called Hrebenne, so I stole the name and it became a Canadian town with Wizards in it.

* * *

So many words!

* * *

Mia forgot her dream even before she woke up, slowly blinking in the twilight allowed by the dark blue curtains. She listened to the old pendulum clock tick for a while, enjoying the rare feeling of having slept well.

They _let_ her sleep in, which was nice, she thought. She wondered briefly if walking to breakfast in her pyjamas was going to earn her a nickname, then realized that it didn't matter anyway because she didn't actually know the way to the cafeteria. Wondering the halls, _lost_ , in her pyjamas, was going to do wonders for the Branch's first impression of her.

Even so - surprised that she cared - she threw on her uniform, leaving her flannel pyjama shirt under her coat because it was warm. Deciding to wear boots for safety's sake, she also pulled on some socks, expending a pointless amount of effort to find a matching pair.

Mia scooped Evariste up into her arms and nervously took a deep breath standing in front of her door, noticing an imperfection on the top left corner. She just about managed to read the graffiti scratched roughly into the wood; it said _Caitlin._

She found that the corridors weren't as empty as HQ, which was a little counterintuitive and made her wonder whether there was more going on here just because Komui was too far away to shoot down unethical research ideas. Scientists rushed past her every minute or so, not giving her a second glance because obviously no-one would want to talk to her. It was easier on her conscience if she didn't have the opportunity to offend anyone too many times a day.

She was really looking for Nathanael. Ever since their goodbye yesterday, Mia had become unconsciously obsessed with becoming his friend. She decided that he was the only person at the branch that she remotely respected, and right now she needed such a person to show her the way to breakfast.

"Hey! You!" Someone called. She continued to walk, assuming that it wasn't directed at her. A lot of people here were shouting anyways, there was no reason-

"Exorcist!"

 _Maybe Sokaro is here… but it is unlikely that anyone would use that tone with a general… crap._ She stopped and added annoyance to her already grim face before turning to see a white-coated official power-walking towards her. She hugged Evariste to her chest.

"You're Koretnaar, yeah?" The woman asked, not even looking at her over her clipboard and ignoring Mia's carefully prepared expression.

"Yes."

" _Great_." She checked something off on her clipboard. "Come with me, please."

Mia took a step forward when the official turned her back, but then remembered to be annoying.

"Where?" She asked, like she actually wanted to know. The official turned back to face her, twisting her mouth in a grimace. Her hair was cut short and plain, except for a small brass clip holding back her fringe and revealing a forehead ruled with worry lines. Mia couldn't tell if she was older than she looked or just incredibly tired.

"Chief Epstein wants to see you."

Mia accepted that as a good reason to walk and followed the official, trying and failing to be attentive to what she was saying. She was probably introducing herself, but Mia had already decided that she disliked everyone here (except her guardian angel Nathanael), so there was no need to listen for names. Hearing the word ' _breakfast',_ though, she snapped back into focus.

"What?"

Ev sank his claws painfully into her arm. She stroked his head.

"I said, have you been told where the cafeteria is? Would you like a map?"

Mia swallowed her hate down because at that moment in time a map was something that she was ready to beg for.

"Um, yes. Please."

 _This sincerity will cost me_. The woman smiled quickly and continued to walk at Mia's running pace, until they reached the Chief's office, hidden among desks of scientists hard at work, and their tall monuments of science equipment. The smell of coffee wafted through the air, keeping everyone at their preferred level of zombie.

The scene was not unlike the one at HQ.

"In here," her guide indicated, opening the heavy door unceremoniously, shooing her in and disappearing - giving her a good opportunity to run - but Mia braced herself and took the few steps inside the office.

Renny Epstein looked her up and down and sighed.

"We ask for an Exorcist and they send us a toothpick?"

Mia froze, the words slowly repeating themselves in her head.

 _We. Ask. For. An. Exorcist._

 _And. They. Send. Us. A._

 _Toothpick._

The last one raised in pitch, like a question.

She felt something twist inside her, even before the implication of that simple sentence hit her. It wasn't even the fact that it was difficult to not be scrawny when one was fifteen and malnourished by grief and misery. It was mostly that she hadn't asked to be made into a weapon in the first place, and now they had reduced her to a tiny, disposable object. _Toothpick._

Evariste scrambled from her arms.

 _This is what they think of me, so this is what I am._

She was out of the room in an instant, biting back tears. Kicking the door shut so hard that the lights flickered, she had to cut through a heavy silence to get past the science division. Olivia had been wrong – she wasn't ready for this fight. She would never be. The very soul inside of her felt disgusting, laced with the poisonous crystal that God had cursed her with. Her body didn't belong to her because she was only carrying it around for the sake of the Black Order.

She scratched at her skin but it stayed intact and the shuddering sound of her screaming wasn't loud enough because she was an object and objects couldn't make sound.

* * *

Latin words filtered through the wooden door of her room, enveloping it in a ghostly, echoing atmosphere. Mia inadvertently gazed at an iron cross adorning the east-facing wall. The figure nailed to it was being lulled to death by the singing, she saw it swaying to the melody.

She recognized the voice as Nathanael's, then dismissed it as wishful thinking. A Finder had other things to do than comfort a spoilt, broken teenage girl, therefore the lullaby was most likely a figment of her insanity. Her brain indicating that it really _was_ damaged.

She continued pretending to herself that she was about to fall asleep, enjoying the imaginary orchestra and the pain inflicted by Ev snatching at her hair.

* * *

When her brain snapped back to reality, Mia was standing at the gates to a grim-looking Canadian town where gargoyles returned her curious gaze with a silent threat. She hissed at them, making Nathanael stiffen beside her.

"They've been known to attack people, you know."

"Good."

For the first time in three days, Mia was aware of her surroundings. Suddenly and incredibly aware, even of Nathanael's barely visible reaction at her rough voice, unused for so long. The heavy scimitar strapped across her back was all at once not a weapon but an apology from a Chief. She searched through her memories for the one when she received it but it was like digging through mud to find clear water.

She noticed Nathanael frowning and asked what was wrong.

"This place doesn't feel right – look how happy everyone is," he pointed out thoughtfully. Confused as to why he was being so negative all of the sudden, she felt an obligation to be contrary.

"People aren't supposed to be sad all the time."

Had he planned this? Was he smirking because he got her to say that sentence out loud? His expressions were a mystery. They walked past a group of laughing youths, dressed eccentrically with a neat streak but it was only when a middle-aged man skipped past them with a hum of a melody that she had to admit that the Finder was right.

"I'm not expecting them to," he said with condescension, "there _is_ something between happy and sad you know."

Mia was about to say _emptiness_ but decided that she was done letting people know how she felt. She looked back at the stone gargoyles for inspiration on how to stay cold-hearted, but they had turned their winged backs on her.

"What's wrong with this town?" It sounded a little less stupid than _why are we here?_ Nathanael gave her another look that she couldn't read and shook his head.

"Do you ever actually listen to what people say?"

Mia considered how to reply so as to not make it seem like she was feeling sorry for herself. True, she'd been dealt some crappy cards lately, but didn't everyone at the Order feel that way? The only difference was that she couldn't deal with it. _Wouldn't it be easier not to_ _be a weakling?_

She pushed her emotions aside an decided to pay attention. She was making a lot of life-altering decisions today.

Nathanael sighed because she didn't offer a reply.

"Sorry." It was like he apologised out of spite. "A group of masked wizards is trying to take over the town."

She almost laughed out loud but covered her mouth at the last second to hide a grin.

"Can we join them?"

His eyes turned her way quickly so she raised an eyebrow and then tried not to look away. He indicated a sign for a pub some ways down the main street and she nodded.

"I'm sure that was a joke, but going undercover is a plan you could consider."

"Oh," she realized, "you're not a wizard."

Nathanael flinched and her first feeling was anger. She set her feet down a little heavier on the ground, scuffing her boots with dirt. He wanted this? _After it ruined my life and so many others, he wants his freedom taken away too?_ Then she thought that Nathanael wasn't _her_ and that he probably wanted, more than anything, the power to protect those he cared about and possibly the world.

Mia shuffled through her feelings for the fleeting wisp of empathy then tried to amplify it. _If I'd known that Akuma existed, if I had known that Ethel was going to die, wouldn't I have sold my soul to save her?_ It was when Ethel turned to dust that her synchronization became redundant.

 _Then this is how he feels. Sad, powerless and angry. I should probably avoid mentioning it again._

"Mia?"

"Huh?" She'd completely missed everything he'd been saying, despite her best efforts. Managing to look apologetic, she forgave herself because she knew that it would take time and was already quite proud of the empathy practice round.

"I was saying that you can walk through walls and are invisible anyway, so you don't need to go undercover."

Mia shook her head, her thoughts already questioning whether the street was too dusty to skateboard down in the empty silence of night.

"If they're accommodators they–"

"AAAAAAH!" a child screamed.

 _Whooooosh -_ a giant bird flew overhead.

The sky was _sparkling_ and on fire. Mia's heart panicked but she ran towards the smoke, activating her Innocence and shouting something incomprehensible to the Finder. Those were definitely Akuma where the explosions were happening, their souls glowing miserably.

Despite the yelling and fire, people seemed to be running _towards_ the commotion, rather than away from it, which made getting there difficult and finding a safe place to leave her body even more so.

Nathanael grabbed her hand and pulled her through a door to the pub they'd been heading to. Someone tried to elbow past her so she stuck her foot out and tripped them over, making up for all the efforts at niceness from earlier.

She immediately felt better, but donned an innocent look of fear just in case the guy was planning to get revenge, pretending that she couldn't see him sprawled on the sidewalk and cursing.

"You can go," Nathanael let go of her hand as soon as they were sitting at a table, "I'll keep you safe, you should go."

He wore a look of such earnest concern that for a moment she thought that he must be lying.


	11. Team

I do not own DGM.

I'm not very impressed with this chapter but it needed posting! I had to rewrite it twice, because the Wizards are very important to me, and also I know next to nothing about how towns work so I apologise now to any politicians out there.

* * *

You are always more real than fiction.

* * *

The last time she'd left her body in a building during an Akuma attack was Paris but she tried not think about that. Nathanael couldn't die. She couldn't comprehend a world where Nathanael was killed, so it would be alright.

She crashed through the roof and flew above the street to get a better view. What she thought was a bird earlier was actually a human being, floating in midair with their feet stationed on a spear. A black cloak billowed around them, and when they turned she saw a full-face mask tied around their head with an excess of striped ribbon.

Her breath hitched when she saw the intensity in the Wizard's eyes. They looked at her for a fraction of a second then swung down and grabbed the spear from under their feet. She could see hints that gravity still applied to the being, unlike her, but they were subtle. It reminded her of watching acrobats in a circus.

In fact, it was _exactly_ like watching an acrobat.

They somersaulted around the spear again and landed on it in a crouch, all the while flying at a breakneck pace towards one of the Akuma. Mia held her breath, holding back just out of curiosity.

The Wizard flew right through the demon, rending it in two. It's soul escaped into the sky with serenity on its face, whispering a heart-felt thank you that the Wizard didn't hear. The other Akuma – a level-two – attacked. It was in the shape of a ballerina, with a vicious looking headdress and sharp, pointed shoes. It's hands were made of knives that glinted in the light of it's mangled energy source, but one of them was already on it's way to the Wizard.

Mia didn't wait for them to get their bearings after the quick evasive manouver. She drew her scimitar with both hands and kicked off the air in the demon's direction, too fast to be anything more than a blur. She swung the weapon at it's chain to add to the momentum, but it only chipped it slightly, pushing her off her course.

A knife flew through her back, sending with it a tiny spark of illogical despair. She drowned it in anger and swung her arms around to face the Akuma again. It was probably close to another evolution and frankly she had doubts about her ability to handle a level-three. One of those could probably tear her soul apart and it wasn't something she was willing to risk.

"Get the fuck out of my way," she heard the wizard hiss in her direction as the Akuma flew feet first at her, missed and pirruetted with her arms spinning out to slice the air. Mia didn't fail to notice the crowds of humans cheering from below. It was disgusting.

She did not grace the performer with a reply and blocking an attack from the demon found her revolver with another hand.

If she could only get it to stay still.

The Wizard made a stab at the demon with the spear, but because they were using the weapon to fly as well it weakened the attack. Assuming the spear could fly on its own, Mia figrued that the only reason the Wizard was in the air was for show.

Motives aside, they had distracted her enemy enough for Mia to aim properly and shoot; from this distance, the demon didn't stand a chance and crumbled to pieces with a bewildered cry.

She turned her attention back to the Wizard, who had already figured out that the crowds couldn't see her. They executed a bow towards the crowd, then subtly ran their finger across their neck in a way that was clearly meant for Mia.

Leaving her more confused than worried, the accommodator vanished into the horizon.

* * *

In the time she was gone, Nathanael had ordered food for them both and wrote half a page in what looked like a journal. It quickly disappeared as soon as she opened her eyes but she managed to notice that it was weathered enough to have been there for each Akuma battle that he would have faced.

She explained what happened but he only nodded.

"That's what the reports said," he told her, the condescension forgiven because it was her own fault for not reading them. "It's assumed that they're destroying Akuma to get the public on their side."

"Do you think they might be luring them here too, or is there an unstable Innocence fragment?"

She felt anxiety before she even realized what was wrong; her heart-rate wasn't slowing down. It was usually a minute or two that it was like this after she returned, though it had been about five and it was still hammering like she'd run a marathon.

"Could be both," Nathanael narrowed his eyes at her, "are you feeling okay?"

"Yeah," she said quickly. Too quickly – there was no way he'd believe that. She corrected her face into a smile and repeated, "yeah, I'm fine."

 _This isn't his problem to worry about._ Hopefully that got across. She slowed her breathing as much as possible and turned her attention back to the actual problem.

"I can't go undercover now, they've seen me in my uniform," she pointed out, "do you think they know about the Order?"

"If they do, it'll be only extremely vague information."

"Eh?"

"The Order… they uh… when an employee with a lot of information leaves they um… erase their memories first."

Nathanael took a swig of his drink, hiding his face. Mia stared at him, refusing to comprehend. Her heart suddenly had reason to be unsettled - that this was possible at all was sickening, but that the Order did it on a regular basis…

The first question that came to her was, " _how?"_

"A drug, probably… or sorcery. If you think about it it's not even that surprising." He still wasn't looking at her.

She made a strangled sound and decided it would be better to think about it later. Or not at all.

"Okay, fine. Lets say they do know then… vaguely. They're already paranoid about politicians and the police upsetting their plan to take over the world, so they're going to be especially wary of us."

"… you're saying we should keep our affiliations secret?"

She nodded. He sighed.

"There's no way they'd trust any stranger though; we'd have to keep this up for months to get anywhere."

Mia did realize there was a third option, but the Order wasn't going to like it.

She thought quietly as a waiter set their food out. The cutlery was neatly wrapped in a napkin, which only somewhat made up for the lack of tablecloth. The pie smelled nice enough to make her smile at her plate - she was going to eat food and she was going to enjoy it, not just because it was good but because it meant surviving a while longer.

"What if… what if we left them alone," she muttered, quietly. She didn't look at his face, because it would either be disgusted or surprised and then she'd have to explain. Nathanael didn't reply, thankfully, and she started pretending that she never uttered those words.

She stabbed her pie with a plain piece of cutlery, foregoing the knife and scooping up a dripping forkful of vegetables in gravy. It was unlike anything she'd ever had at home, where her parents regularly fired chefs for being too boring. _They'd love Jerry,_ she thought with a smile, and then realized that she missed him. She missed listening to the cheerful conversations that took place just so that doomed people had something to laugh at.

The Finder was silent and she wasn't planning on speaking either.

Edith had still been digging through Ethel's ashes when Klaud explained to her that she had no other option. There had been neither hesistation nor apology. It made her wonder what the Order would do if she failed to report an Accommodator, what the consequences could possibly be.

"If we can't convince them to join they'll send the cavalry," Nathanael broke the silence finally. It was a strange mixture of wisdom and threat. Mia didn't ask who the cavalry were because she liked to pretend that no-one at the Order could faze an Exorcist in a fight. General Klaud had just mentioned that the Order had 'methods' and she was too distraught at the time to doubt her.

Mia didn't want to do this job at all. It would make her a coward and a hypocrite even _if_ she convinced herself that there was no other way - there was no saving her from the guilt. She forced herself to continue eating but it seemed pointless.

"How many are there, did you say?" She didn't want to ask, but it was the way forward and it was much better than thinking about not wanting to live.

"Three or four; it hasn't been confirmed yet." Nathanael was watching her suspiciously so she did not smile when a spark of hope ignited in her soul. _I can save at least one or two, then, pretend that they don't exist._ She would have to get as much information out of the Finders as she could and then complete the mission on her own.

She questioned further, and found out that their abilities were vague, and their hiding places completely unknown except for one abandoned building that the police had ambushed them in once.

They weren't anarchists exactly – it was more about overthrowing the current (somewhat corrupt) city council. Politics were too often rigged for there to be any other way to get an honest person running for mayor. However, since what they were doing was on all counts illegal (theft, sabotage), they could not take control of Hrebenne in any meaningful way if the people did not support them.

The more she heard, the more Mia realized that she was definitely one of the worst people they could have picked for this job. Nathanael had simplified the political situation but it was still horribly uninteresting and all her efforts at paying attention failed.

She couldn't let Nathanael take control of this mission though, so she pretended that she understood everything and was already preparing a plan of attack. What she needed was to talk to the group without any Finders around.

* * *

As she always did, she scouted the city for Akuma, destroying just enough to get their attention but not enough for that to take effect until tomorrow. It was a weekend, which meant that the streets would be perfectly crowded. This was a trap that weaved itself, all she had to do was sit and wait.

Nathanael left the next morning for a chat with the chief of police, in the hopes of gathering more data. She cleared the Akuma around the station to make sure he would be safe, and then found a group that was heading towards the centre and followed. A plain black coat covered her uniform, and a cap hid her hair so she could easily walk within fifty metres of them without fear of discovery.

A haze had crept up from a nearby swamp, turning the streets into milky canals. It was that quiet time in between the sunrise and awakening, when it was too empty outside for anyone other than demons to stir the misty air into hurricanes.

"I swear I'm going to destroy you myself if you don't shut the fuck up."

The Akuma had been bickering for a while, about one thing or the other, but the latest topic was _relevant._ It seemed like they were getting quite fed up with constantly loosing to the Wizards, the latest bout of dissappearances blamed on them, but they both had opposite ways of dealing with it.

The rude one wanted to attack with an army, while the other was obviously scared for his life. ' _Lets_ _just look for another job,'_ he'd been saying for the last three minutes.

"We'll just tell the Earl to send-"

"Oh? You're saying I ain't strong enough? The Earl sent us 'cause we can totally beat the crap out of them. Easily. Get your shit together."

It was a lie and both the Akuma and Mia knew it. They might be spectacular at killing people but Exorcists were a different matter. The last two had died ambushed by a three-hundred strong army, taking down most of them before bleeding out. These two demons were going to die and there was nothing they could do about it; it was the one thing the Order and the Earl had in common – both were remorseless to the point of being inhumane when it came to their weapons.

She heard a flutter and something kicked off the shingles of a nearby roof. It looked to be a raven, but the sound it made wasn't the sound she usually associated with birds taking flight. It was more like a thud.

Barely even thinking about it, she found the handle of her revolver a second before a rustle behind her alerted her of danger. She spun and pointed the gun with a steady hand, finding nothing. Her next breath was audibly distressed.

She'd activated her Innocence, but the only Akuma she could see were the pair dissapearing some seventy metres ahead. On the other hand, a common thief wouldn't think they'd have to ambush her to win in a fight.

 _Wizards. This was surprisingly simple._ Feeling quite nervous at the realization that she would have to talk to strangers, she paused to recollect the sentences she had prepared the previous night.

"I want to talk to you," she said quietly.

She saw a figure on the roof right before it jumped off, swinging the blunt edge of a sword at her before even landing. Mia just about managed to avoid it with an ungraceful step back and was forced to stop before she impaled her spine on a spear.

"You're stalking our prey," the Spear Acrobat hissed. It was the same hiss she heard yesterday, not quite clear enough to let her identify gender, but intense enough for the anger to come across.

"I wanted to talk to you," she confessed immediately, dropping her hands to her sides but holding on to the revolver, "because I'd love to let you kill them if you did it without endangering civilians."

The Wizard in front of her spoke for the first time.

"You're from the Order." His mask was of the same style but decorated differently; with red butterfly wings stretched out across the face.

Mia wasn't sure if what he'd said was a question or an accusation, but she nodded. The two exchanged a few glances, their hands twitching in barely noticable gestures. Mia pointedly did not raise her hands, keeping them at her sides despite the blade digging into her back. She worked hard to make her face look nonchalant.

"We're not interested in joining your organization," the Swordsman said. Mia rolled her eyes.

"I know. It's only a problem because the Order is desperate for new Exorcists, and they have a proper messed up code of ethics."

The Spear Acrobat snorted an unimpressed laugh. Although she did not usually sympathise with people, Mia cringed at the naïvety until they added,

"They'd pay a lot for you then, won't they?"

"What…?" She was thrown by the lack of visible expressions, but once it got through to her what they meant it was her turn to laugh. "Did you hear what I just said about the ethics?"

 _Nobody likes me there anyway._

Silence. She didn't know whether they were confused or telepathically communicating a plan, but she used it to get some information across.

"Honestly I just thought you'd appreciate the warning… so can you stop pointing sharp things at me? I uh… I wanted to tell you that the Order doesn't actually know how many Wizards there are – I suggest you use that to save a couple of your friends."

Mission accomplished. Whether they would use her kindly given help or not was entirely up to them. She'd have to make a show of trying to convince or capture them later, for Nathanael's sake, and it would have been easier with them playing along but talking had never been her strong suit and she just didn't care enough.

The Swordsman nodded, fractionally, and Mia looked back just in time to see the Spearperson incline their head. _In the grand scheme of things,_ she thought _, they aren't exactly nice people. I'm only doing this to erase my own guilt._

"Come with us," the Swordsman decided finally, spinning his sword in a practiced knot. It dissappeared into the folds of his cloak, but she was certain that if she made any sudden move it would find itself in her throat.


	12. Temporal Symmetry

Dead spider in a bell jar.

* * *

"This is the abandoned hideout, right?"

The Swordsman confirmed her guesswork with a nod.

It stood on a thin layer of lifting fog, in a part of town that rarely accommodated honest people. About a quarter of the bricks were lighter than the rest, and the windows were also a patchwork of wood and broken glass. Someone, probably the Wizards, must have put a lot of effort into keeping it standing not so long ago.

Inside she found a destroyed home, bared to it's bones. Lighter rectangular patches where pictures had hung, faded maps, broken masks, a torn net hung from hooks on the walls. An abandoned chair and a small wooden coffee table sat in a corner, each missing a leg. When she looked up, she saw three swings suspended on the high ceiling, one of which was broken and pointed at the groud. _Trapezes,_ she remembered. One wall was completely taken up by a makeshift scaffold.

 _These are people who_ live.

"It's beautiful," she smiled, without looking at the Wizards.

There was a small gas stove buried in cardboard boxes dividing the space.

"It was a good place," the Swordsman admitted.

Mia slowly marked a circle in the dust with her foot. _It_ _would_ _be incredibly sad to sell these people to the war._

The Spearperson was dragging the table to the centre of the room, where the other wizard had laid out a threadbare blanket to serve as a carpet, and one of the boxes to keep it standing. He indicated for her to sit so she did. They produced three glasses of water and a plate of cookies from some secret stash, like they entertained guests here on a regular basis.

"You said you wanted to help," the Swordsman said.

"What do I call you?" She asked, because it was easier to think of people as people when one knew their names. She took a cookie and nibbled at it to show trust.

"I'm Admiral," the Swordsman tautologically pointed at himself, then at his friend, "this is Sparrow."

"I refuse to call you Admiral," she objected immediately, sounding as matter-of-fact as she could. Sparrow, whose codename was reasonable enough, burst into laughter and hit the table with the flat of their gloved hand. Rings spread across the water in the glasses.

"Ha! You owe me five dollars," they continued to laugh, and though Mia hated to be used as a means of winning a bet, she was glad that Sparrow had less reason to dislike her now. Admiral was shaking his head sadly.

"Right," he said with no further argument, but he sounded like he was smiling, "then Nessa is fine."

"Nessa," she repeated, "okay. How much do you know about the Black Order?"

* * *

Mia told them everything, starting at the Earl and ending with the history of the Cube. They swallowed most truths, choking slightly on the 'destruction of humanity' part, and eagerly accepting the Order's ambiguous morality. _This is exactly why we won't be joining,_ they said, and Mia shook her head.

 _The Cavalry_. It was just one word and it scared the hell out of her. Nathanael had said it like it was indisputable that the Order's secret police were not something to be messed with. She suspected they were sorcerers of some kind, they would have to be to inspire such fear even among Exorcists.

On the other hand, the Order might not send them at all – sending someone more politically inclined would be the first step.

"So what you're saying is," Sparrow had crossed their arms skeptically, "that we should give up before the fight even starts."

"Yes," if they wanted her to hate herself for saying so they succeeded, "because when they come, they'll come for _all_ of you. This way one or two people have a chance to live an actual life."

"Knowing that the others sacrificed theirs?"

She shrugged.

"I'm not trying to convince you." _But it would make me feel less dead if what I'm doing ends up helping someone and hurting the Order._

"We're going to discuss this with the rest of the group," Nessa said finally, "and let you know what plan we come up with. Can we count on your help either way?"

"Nope." She laughed at their silence, then clarified, "I'm willing to lie, keep secrets and give you information but I'm not helping you fight the Order directly... that's insane."

 _Because Olivia is at the Order, and she is not indispensable._

* * *

Mia lied to Nathanael gleefully at their rendezvous back at the lodgings. She had always liked the idea of telling lies but never had much opportunity to try it out before. It was a perk of her new life that she could lie with purpose.

The inn was clean, but rickety. Every floorboard and stair creaked, the wood was worn thin as paper in places and Mia wasn't sure if the ceilings would last beyond the turn of the Century. It _was_ pretty though, in its own quaint way, and someone had drawn vines along the walls with black ink, giving the inside an outdoor feel.

It all added to the chaos.

She copied some of the pictures down into her journal while she ate dinner, along with a sketch of the mismatched china to send Olivia with her next letter. Nathanael had ordered food again, apparently already knowing her well enough to realize she wouldn't eat unless the pie was shoved at her face. He was probably using her conscience against her too.

"The Mayor is being awfully quiet," Nathanael remarked when she prompted him about his findings from the police.

"I wouldn't call all the festivals quiet."

They'd found out why Hrebenne was so unusually joyful – the town hall was mandating every other week a festival, the latest of which, scheduled for tomorrow, celebrated some old myth about the nearby woods. It looked like they were running out of things to be happy about though.

"I'd say they're using them to drown out the silence."

Mia smiled cheerfully at the passing inn owner, indicating that the food was delicious. She smiled back with a crinkle in her eye that suggested a lack of sleep.

"It must be costing them a lot…"

"Makes sense if they're corrupt, like the Wizards say."

* * *

Out in the streets everyone was dressed as a fairy, since it was relatively cheap to weave a twig into one's hair. Daisy chains and wreaths were rarer, probably because it took a lifetime to make one.

Tiny children were scattering flowers everywhere they could get them to stick, including strangers' hoods and shopping baskets. Mia bought a couple of blue asters and jammed the buquet of heads into her hair with pins and orange ribbon. Nathanael remarked that the colours clashed terribly, because he didn't understand that that was precisely the point.

She'd cleared up the Akuma in the morning and still felt the anxiety of an erratic heartbeat. In perspective, it made sense that her body would object to her uncoupling her soul from it, but Komui promised that it would get better as she got used to it. The Innocence fragment would help... As far as she knew, Innocence was not concious so how could it know that she hated it?

 _Fuck this and to hell with my heart,_ she repeated, _it's not like I need it._

The Wizards had chosen this day to make their escape, probably because of the amount of people on the streets. They were, first and foremost, performers. The bigger the audience the better, especially if everyone was dressed as mythical creatures - they created a rather beautiful stage that would be shameful to waste. Mia just hoped that she wouldn't have to clean up the mess afterwards.

Nathanael was humming, unaware that their mission was about to fail. There were Finders mixed into commoners patrolling the town, terribly noticable with their hoods and backpacks, neither of which would help them survive very long. Mia wasn't certain of their motives, so she just tended to ignore any Finder other than Nathanael. It was easier to watch them die this way.

"Mia!" Her guide shouted and pointed at a rooftop. Sparrow was standing majestically on a chimney, dressed in some kind of patterned, poncho shaped cloak and a mask made of autumn leaves. They'd picked asters too, to contrast the reds and oranges of their striped ribbons. Clouds of smoke billowed out of a cylinder in their hand, and moments later choked the fairies on the ground. Document facsimiles and banknotes fluttered down like autumn leaves.

Mia would have loved to climb the building and chase after the acrobat, but her own skills were pretty laughable and limited to cartwheels. She ran through the streets instead, scattering through crowds and smoke granades. Nathanael kept up with her at a jog, and she wondered how believable this was.

"I just want to talk!" She shouted at them, "stop! We're not enemies!"

Sparrow laughed and otherwise ignored her, cartwheeling across a terrace and disappearing gracefully into a walled garden. Mia stopped for a breather and generally made herself look defeated, which wasn't that hard considering she couldn't get enough air through her lungs to spare for a syllable. She'd activated her Innocence, just in case any Akuma were planning an ambush at the wrong place and it had become increasingly difficult to breathe.

"Are you okay?"

Nathanael glanced at her with impatient concern, then at the garden where Sparrow had escaped and eventually took her arm and sat her down on the steps of some statue. While he contacted the other Finders to assemble them across the town, she put her head on her knees and blinked through the dark patches searing through her vision. She was fully expecting the dizzy spell to pass and when it didn't she grew frightened.

It hurt like something had stabbed her brain and slammed a cricket bat at her chest. She didn't have the energy to tell Nathanael, so she found his hand and squeezed it before worldlessly leaving her body. The pain felt peripheral through her soul, like a memory, which made it possible to form coherent thoughts.

The sight of her face turning blue was miserable enough for tears, but seeing Nathanael slowly realizing that she might be dying was worse. The asters had fallen from her hair when she had ripped at it, and some of the petals still remained stuck to her fingers even in her soul. She left, detached, following Sparrow's path to meet at the appointed spot. The Akuma weren't gathering either, as if they knew something was off.

It was a strange kind of focus that kept her going. The thought that this might be her last minute on Earth didn't seem worth considering, so she made her way along the steps of the Plan, because it was the only thing that she could think to do. She had to at least mention it to them, that the Plan had to be tweaked a little to allow for her absence.

"Hey," someone grabbed her arm, their fingers passing through almost imperceptibly, "Exorcist!"

She turned to look at the butterfly mask staring at her. Nessa had added a crown of giant red flowers to his costume, along with a billowing cloak shaped like wings. He looked like some sort of giant demonic moth, a shape that an Akuma might take.

"Nessa." She couldn't smile, so she returned the stare with a questioning look. "I was about to meet you guys, what are you doing here?"

"Dominique called for an emergency... didn't you see the flare?" He nodded at the direction where she left Nathanael.

"I must have been facing the other way."

Mia had no idea what she was doing. The Plan was to meet at the bridge end of Church Street, where Cirri would be waiting with barrels of ash and fireworks, but Nessa talked like that wasn't where he was going. She couldn't think of what to do.

"This way," Nessa turned and started walking to the place she was desperate to turn away from. But an instruction was an instruction, and it was easiest just to follow. As much as she liked to think that people cared about her sometimes, she was confused as to why there was need to call the emergency. Dom was the back-up, watching from the sidelines and the one who would keep living if the others were captured by the Order.

Maybe there was some other emergency – _someone else must be hurt,_ she thought, right until they reached the statue where she left her body and she saw all the commotion. Sparrow and Dom were there, which meant that only Cirri had kept to the Plan. Cirri was obviously the only rational one. Nathanael was sitting on his heels with his arms hung limply by his sides and Mia wondered why he was crying when she was only a stranger.

"What happened?" Nessa left her side to crouch by Dom.

Maybe anyone could be moved to pity seeing a teenage girl die.

Dominique was probably trying to save her but Mia didn't want to look to find out. Instead, she watched Nessa's cloak float around him in the wind and scatter flower petals all over the ground. She only looked up at the medic's voice, startled by how sharp it was and that it was directed at her soul not her body.

"You're going to be fine, but you have to get back."

This was when Sparrow noticed that Mia had appeared. While Mia tried to comprehend what it meant to be fine, Sparrow moved towards her in an intimidating fashion that made her feel cornered despite there being no corners around to hide in.

"What the fuck is happening ?" she asked. This was a technical question, so Mia could answer without much thinking.

"My synchro rate dropped too low," she cleared her throat so that her voice sounded less like a whimper, "and the Innocence failed to stabilise me after I activated it. It usually takes care of the shock but..."

She trailed off seeing Sparrow reach for their mask, holding her breath as the autumn leaves fluttered away to reveal the angry face of a girl not much older than Mia herself. Nathanael was trying to find her but his eyes were blind to her soul. She ignored him. Sparrow looked like she was ready to kill someone, like she had only just realized that being an Exorcist would mean dying in the near future.

"You mean the _Innocence_ is killing you?"

"No," Mia corrected unnecassarily, her gaze drawn back to Sparrow's eyes, "… just letting me die." The leaves from the girl's mask swooped down and settled on the grey carpet of dust below their feet. Maybe it's because Sparrow was expecting a contradiction, or some sort of argument, but horror had silenced her for the few breaths it took for Dominique to push her aside.

"Mia, darling, I know it's hard but you need to deactivate your Innocence," she advised, her hand reaching to her shoulder but sinking right though. Mia brought her eyes up to watch her collected pleading. Dom always talked to her like she was talking to a child, but this time Mia had to admit to behaving like one. She still felt the pain in the back of her mind, threatening to become reality if she ever returned.

She just wanted it to be over.

"I'll keep you stable, it's going to be okay."

Dominique didn't wear a mask, she never had, it's what made it so believable that she was trying to help.

Mia didn't want the sight of ordinary gray colours and the unrelenting weight of being attached to an imperfect machine whose primary function was amplifying emotions. It wasn't clear how long she would last if she just stayed as a detached soul, but it would certainly be less painful.

"Mia," she heard a soft melodic voice, "I know it's your own choice to make… but don't choose to die."

She looked at Nathanael, who had taken her life-less hand, and then looked down at her palm in it's pure white soul-form. A diagonal line ran across from the index finger to the base. She smiled.

He didn't realize it, but Nathanael had just saved her life.


	13. Line Integral

I just want to thank you all for reading this though it is kinda depressing and weird. I'm sorry I haven't uploaded anything in a while, but I actually finished writing this story a couple of days ago, there are still a few more chapters to go after this one but the plot is an absolute disaster.

* * *

Listen.

* * *

She woke to the tolling of a bell, reminiscing about her funeral. Ethel and Edith were buried side by side, both coffins empty and shut during the ceremony. Mia had sat on the railing of the mezzanine that housed the organ, watching her parents shake with tears and hold each other. Her own emotions had been stumbling over themselves for the past week and eventually collapsed in a desperate pile of mush.

She couldn't remember whether she'd cried, just that she wished Ethel had been sitting beside her. It was the same wish that people felt when the Earl appeared to trick them and she could see right then how fucking perfect the system was.

The light was about the same now as it had been that day – bright and horrific – and the flowers on her bedside reminded her of the ones stacked around the coffins. She looked at them thoughtfully for a while, then sat up on her elbows until her head stopped spinning, inspecting her surroundings further.

It was some sort of hospital room, with thin, pale blue curtains and a floor empty of anything beside the nightstand and the bed. She carefully lowered her head below the frame and found no monsters underneath, not even the dust bunnies she was expecting. Grabbing the flowers, Mia stood and drew the curtains which revealed a wide window facing a row of tall, crumbling terraced houses. Their windows looked black in the sunlight, silent compared to the swarming of carts and people below.

Spotting a messenger, Mia tore the head off one of the flowers, and threw it down into his path. The boy looked up at her and met her gaze, too startled to show any expression before he remembered the message and hurried off. She tore the head off another flower, and another until they were all headless, and chucked the whole bouquet off the window ledge, laughing at how they spun and landed in a flurry of surprise. She was about to reach for the vase of water when the door opened.

"Mia?"

She was still laughing when she turned to face Nathanael. His eyes narrowed suspiciously as she dusted the remaining petals off her hands.

"I'm glad you're okay," he just said, like he'd been expecting to find her pale and cold.

"Dom said I would be, so..."

"Dom?" His face betrayed only a little disgust, the rest was impatience. It was the first time that Mia realized that he didn't agree with her and was therefore an enemy.

"I should have known," he spat out each word then repeated, "I should have known that you weren't on our side. It makes perfect sense – I thought it was an act but you _really_ don't care about the fate of this world."

She shook her head, dissapointment sticking to her throat.

"It's not a place worth caring for," she said, surprised at her own words but growing to like them more and more by the second. She grinned, tipping her head to one side and staring at him as he stared at the window, "thanks for saving my life."

He finally met her eyes at the gratitude and chuckled.

"You think I wouldn't have tried even knowing you're a traitor?"

Maybe it was because of the Christianity that so fundamentally defined him, or the fact that she was a useful tool for the Order, but Mia couldn't find an answer. It was obvious that he was sad that she didn't understand the optimistic ideology, and she was disappointed that he believed in it at all.

"Where are they… the Wizards?" she asked instead.

"Well," he sighed, "this is Dr Severin's hospital. She's working now, but I suspect she will want to know you're awake. As for the others I don't know."

He looked at her questioningly, as if expecting that she was one of them now, then left the room without another word.

* * *

"I see you think you've recovered well," Dominique tutted, sitting her down in the nearest chair and signalling for her assistant to fetch tea. "How do you feel?"

"I'm fine," she lied immediately, "same as always. What happened to the others?"

She had ambushed the medic in the reception area, demanding attention with a swoon caused by the short walk down the stairs.

"Please sit back down, will you, and here," she handed her a cup of some horrific brew that was certainly not tea, "drink this first."

Mia made a disgusted face that Dom was not unfamiliar with, then sipped at the drink. It tasted sharp, like ginger.

"After I made sure your heart wouldn't stop, your friend and I took you here. The others escaped to one of the hideouts, in case anyone else from the Order shows up. I imagine that _he_ reported everything."

Dom shifted her eyes away from Mia and Mia felt guilt start gnawing at her soul again.

"Why didn't you wear a mask, Dom? They'll come for you… you need to go and join the others in hiding."

"I will.. maybe. I know you have advised us against it, but joining the Order _is_ an option we are considering. It could help a lot of people."

Mia stood, and the dizziness at the sudden motion was dispelled by frustration growing inside her. Here was another optimist, stupidly expecting her to understand.

"Since when do you give a shit about other people?" Purely by accident, the teacup fell out of her hands and smashed on the floor with a crash that accentuated the silence. Dom didn't even flinch. "The Wizards can't abandon this town," Mia continued, unapologetic, "it needs you. You're… you're a doctor! You're already helping people here. Don't sacrifice your freedom, your _life_ , not for _anything._ "

During the next ten seconds of silence, it became clear that the conversation was finished and Mia had crossed some line that she wasn't aware even existed. Dom cleared her throat officially and gave her a smile.

"It's our choice to make, Mia. You should go home."

* * *

It was a thoughtless request, Mia thought, and left Hrebenne on the first train to the United States without looking for Nathanael. As he wasn't considered a friend anymore she was at liberty to shelve him with all other Finders and she did not have to care about Finders. In fact, it was better to just ignore the sacrificial lambs if one could.

Until the rain began to fall, she felt nervous. It was uncertain what would happen to the Wizards now, and she couldn't think of any way to solve this problem short of somehow tracking them down and convincing them to run. She imagined that the Order officials would corner Dom and unsuccessfully attempt to bribe her into joining. They'd talk about how great sacrifices have to be made in order to defeat evil, and Dom would listen to them patiently while her heart screamed ' _bullshit!'._

And so they would move on to greater promises, and sprinkle them with threats, until Dom politely eviscerated them with a scalpel and made her own way to the Black Order HQ.

" _It's our choice to make, Mia."_

The rain began to fall and she felt at peace, because water falling in small drops from the sky was a miracle grander than any worry that could ever bother her. It ruled the window in diagonal dotted lines, casting shadows on the walls of her compartment that could be mistaken for spatters of blood. It made no sound greater than the clanking of the train wheels and she wished wistfully for a way to capture the image of silent raindrops splashing into the blur beneath her window.

* * *

As the train approached Calgary, Mia's golem fluttered out of her pocket, hitting her in the face with a wing on its way. She opened her eyes wearily then reached for the creature to shut it down, not surprised in the least that it flapped away like it was programmed to.

 _Damn scientists._

"Fine," she hissed at it and rubbed her eyes, "if it's a call go ahead and connect."

The audio shimmered with glitches. She couldn't make out who the voice belonged to.

"Hello? Hello?"

The scenery outside unsettled her with it's vastness and sharp edges. There was too much space; the air thinned into a suffocating vacuum and yet humans, when stepping out onto the small train platform, did not implode and die.

She shuddered, then answered, "who is it?"

"Where the hell are you, Exorcist?"

Offended, Mia glared at the golem like it was at fault.

"Who is it?"

"Oh for fuck's sake, it's Nathanael, _where are you_?"

Mia felt an inexplicable desire to apologise and return to Hrebenne. Shutting down a friendship shouldn't be this hard; they were never meant to be friends in the first place.

"My mission was completed, Finder, I'm on my way to the branch."

It was ridiculous to think that she could be friends with _anyone,_ let alone a person as nice as Nathanael.

Apart from a quiet sigh, Nathanael didn't reply for long enough that she could end the call without being offensive. Stuffing the golem back into her pocket, she looked out of the window again to watch the rain but instead saw the landscape in a yellow filter, bright and spiked with long shadows. The sun was setting on the other side and the light had dug through the clouds.

Mia wanted to see it in all it's glory so she stepped out of her compartment and leaned out of the nearest window to glimpse the disorganised rainbow stripes across the sky to either side of the station building. For a moment the grey and vastness of Calgary were a canvas for light instead of fear.

Mia grabbed her bag without much thinking and hopped off the train, chasing the sky and finding the horizon was a zigzag of mountains. It was like home between winter and spring, when nothing was green or white and the sun had little to reflect.

"Ha!" She heard a screech behind her, and something pushed her from behind. Her knees gave way unexpectedly, but she left her body before it hit the ground. Standing behind her was a level-two Akuma, only partially transformed and pointing a cannon still at the space she had stood in a moment ago.

The stars that appeared on her soul were the same black as the ones on her physical skin, but the virus was already failing. Mia cursed the cross on her chest.

"An _Exorcist!_ Master Earl is going to be _so impressed."_ It spoke French.

There was screaming now, but the area was mostly empty. Because she was crying, Mia couldn't see the sunset anymore and was becoming increasingly lost in the darkness behind her eyelids.

"You wretched, horrible monster," she sobbed, "why do you have to exist!" It couldn't hear her anyway, nobody could.

The demon shifted it's cannon to point at the nearest building, probably hoping there were humans behind the wall. Mia heard the sound and her revolver automatically aimed at it's power source, before shifting the target to its tether. It didn't make sense to her that a soul so tortured would not be begging for death, and so she had to wonder whether it would make a difference whether she killed them or set them free.

With her eyes tightly shut, she pressed her chin into her chest and pulled the trigger until the barrel was empty. In her mind, she remembered what the sunset looked like a minute ago and her smile returned allowing tears to seep through her teeth.

Sunsets, unlike demons, would always continue to occur long after there was no-one on the planet to see them. If something like this was achievable – the awe she felt when the clouds reflected different frequencies of photons – then it was entirely possible that other things of such nature existed as well.


	14. Don't Save Them

I do try to post at least every month, sorry this took so long but I was trying to write something cheerful and found it incredibly difficult, also this is another travelling chapter and I am tired of those. I think I might just skip the happiness, if nobody minds.

* * *

Grow up. Know all. Society is subtle.

* * *

 _The question, Exorcist, is not whether we are free but what we choose to do with the freedom that we have. None of us are truly independent._

It was some grand philosophy that Sparrow had quoted to her in defense of the Wizards' habit to make terrible decisions. Mia had pegged them for selfish the day Sparrow suggested they take her for ransom, but she came to realize that if this was the case they wouldn't use their time to overthrow a small town's government when they could easily steal a fortune and live like kings and queens anywhere. Mia saw only when she left that the tragedy was that Hrebenne would never be free of the Festivals of Corruption, but their Wizards would continue saving lives in other corners of the world.

If everything _had_ gone right, if they hadn't cancelled the plan when she had collapsed, then they would have been made heroes that gave their lives to save hundreds of others. They remained street magicians because of her fraility.

 _I can change that, I can change. I'm going to stop stealing people's lives._

Still outside of her body, she removed the Akuma bullet from her back where it had missed her spine and vital organs by a wide margin and sat there for a while wondering how much blood she would have to loose to never wake up again. It was a tiring thought, and she could not ignore that dying was a way to avoid getting any more people hurt.

Her golem fluttered out of her pocket again and looked strangely like it belonged to this particular landscape of white concrete blocks. It watched her expectantly as she deactivated her Innocence and turned on her back with a fair amount of effort and swearing.

Deciding not to even try sitting up, she nodded at the golem to connect the call.

"Miss Koretnaar? Miss Koretnaar, are you there?"

"Yes," she said, gritting her teeth and finding grains of dirt in her mouth, "I'm listening."

There was _dying_ , and there was also _being indestructible_. Two options. She spat out the dirt back onto the ground.

"Chief Epstain, she answered!" The voice sounded shocked, and a little stressed, "Renny!"

Mia was slightly surprised herself that the Chief wanted to communicate with her. They had to be using the Finders in Hrebenne to reroute the call and it seemed like a lot of effort. She heard a scuffle, and then Chief Epstain was talking.

"Mia, please continue on your way to the branch. I just wanted you to know that the Supervisor has demanded that we return you to HQ as soon as possible, so you will be leaving for England straight away. If you wish, you can make your way to an east coast port now and we will send your personal belongings to you."

"No," she said, not ecstatic about another week on a boat, "don't touch my things. How's Evariste? And why do they want me back?"

"Komui made up some reasons, health or something, and your cat is fine." She said 'fine' like she meant to say 'an annoying monstrosity'. Mia smiled.

"I'll be there soon."

Then she hung up on the Chief, which was something that gave her great satisfaction. By this time the populace of Calgary were starting to notice that there were no monsters left on the streets and they gingerely stepped out of the safety of their homes to see what exactly happened.

"There's a person here!" someone shouted, seeing her, "someone find a doctor!"

Mia remained on the ground and watched the stars appear in the darkening sky. She was formulating a plan of action in her head that would result in becoming entirely self-sufficient in the hopefully not too distant future.

"Is this blood? Are you okay, can you stand?"

"Yes, probably," she was annoyed that having said that she'd probably have to at least try to get up on her own two feet. Never again would she find hersef unexpectedly shot when gaping at a sunset.

Mia turned on her side, the one without a hole in it, and sat on her knees for a breath.

"No, no, actually, don't move, the doctor's on his way."

"It's fine," she hissed, standing up and trying to convince her feet to keep her upright. The world spun across her vision once and she found that she had to conciously shift her weight to compensate for her balance, watching the ground to make sure it didn't approach too fast, "does this shithole have a hospital?"

She had hoped that offending his town would stop the guy from trying to help her, but he still insisted on catching her elbow when she swayed. Some other person caught her other arm and they pulled her away from the mountains and the fading light of sunset.

* * *

A doctor stiched her up while she patched her coat and explained that she was a Demon Hunter. Dust clung to her uniform and she could taste it in her mouth along with the remnants of the Akuma virus, and her refusal of anaesthetic may have made the story more believable.

Mia didn't trust Calgary. It was secretive and isolated by a desert of forests and meadows and nobody looked twice at her hair. She asked whether they saw giant killing machines often and the doctor shook his head in an affirmative manner.

"It's a nightmare… there are… they say, rumours, of a travelling salesman offering to bring your loved ones back, but everyone jokes that there would be no point anyway."

Mia laughed before she could stop herself.

"I'm sorry," she apologised but didn't cease smiling, "that's terrible. Though I don't understand why anyone would ever believe a mysterious fat guy in a top hat could bring anyone back from the dead. People are idiots."

She could feel thread running through a tiny hole in her skin and it made her want to destroy things.

"You've seen him?" The doctor asked calmly, stabbing her with a needle again. She retaliated by stabbing her uniform coat with a needle of her own, though her fingertips were already full of tiny little holes.

"No, but... it's a popular story and it mostly ends with more dead people than it starts with."

Giving up on her coat she dropped the needle and thread, and pulled apart a lock of her hair instead to braid it. It was strange, but she wasn't used to braiding her own hair. When she was angry, Ethel used to braid it in ridiculous messy clumps, and Edith wore it like that for the rest of the day just to embarrass them both.

"It makes sense, though, Miss Exorcist. Grief is never what you expect." When she didn't say anything, he added, "I find that a lot of people make themselves quite miserable worrying about the proper way to grieve."

Mia sat on the hospital bed that evening and listed everything she would need to do to become _indestructible_. The biggest obstacle would be her synchro rate, but she was certain that her brain was still malleable enough to allow for love of humanity if she trained it carefully. Furthermore, she was already learning how to extend her absurd determination from maths problems to other challenges; if she could get to university three years early, becoming a full-fledged independent warrior was certainly possible, even with her impending death looming on the horizon.

* * *

She sat with a machete across her knees, attempting to breathe slowly and clear her mind but whenever she did it felt like a pointless waste of time and her brain would not allow it. Eventually, she gave up and reached for her geometry book to find the parametrization of a circular torus, and then proceeded to calculate it's curvatures.

She finished comparing them with the textbook and immediately activated her Innocence, with her golem measuring her heart rate. With the calculation still fresh in her mind it was easy to enjoy life, because she was _right._ And destroying Calgary's abnormal Akuma population was also _right._ Mia was doing _the right thing,_ and therefore had no reason to hate herself at that moment in time.

A lot of them were still living with their families, keeping up appearances and remaining close to humans. The demons and humans could be described with a predator prey model – the more people Akuma killed, the more Akuma were created but if the human population were to fall below a certain threshold, Akuma production would cease altogether when everyone became incredibly paranoid or dead.

In that case the Akuma would probably raze the town to the ground and that would be it. After collecting a list of people who had died in the last five years, Mia destroyed all the demons she could find and advised the doctor to spread a message about being sceptical of sorcerers that promised miracles. The best way to fight against the Millenium Earl was providing the world with better coping strategies and more therapists, but in most places that was just unreasonable. Good friends were hard to find and good psychiatrists even more so.

* * *

Mia waltzed past the North American branch guardian after three days of travel and sleeplessness, immediately scouting the building for Evariste. She'd missed the horrific furry thing, and also didn't want him to become friends with anyone else, like that cook that prepared his food. He was getting far too attached, like he had already forgotten that she was his only friend in the entire world.

He wasn't going to enjoy the trip home any more than she was, but the thought of seeing Olivia again and, surprisingly, some other Order members, filled her with determination and hope that seemed to rub off on the cat. Evariste dutifully helped her pack, mostly by getting his claws stuck in her clothes and destroying them, and then climbed into his travel box without too much resistance. She wished it was possible for him to travel otherwise, but there were people who disapproved of cats being allowed to roam trains freely.

She couldn't let him out of her cabin on the ocean liner either for fear that he'd fall overboard. Mia took careful note of the fact that she wasn't feeling the slightest bit nauseous like she used to on ships, thanks to her Innocence. If not for the months spent neither eating nor sleeping, she would have noticed sooner that her health had, ironically, improved in general. She added this to the list of things to be thankful for.

She worried about the Wizards obsessively. Eventually it became the only thing standing in the way of her meditation exercises, and she began promising herself that the first thing she'd do when she was on dry land would be to call the North American branch and ask what happened. Communication was often underrated, she thought, and wondered whether worrying about them would be something that she should be doing if she wanted to become emotionally detached.

Mia wrote this all the questions in her journal, along with a detailed outline of everything that happened in Hrebenne. That night she managed to sleep for almost five hours which was excellent, but it didn't stop the worrying for long. She'd ran out of parametrizations of surfaces given in the geometry textbook and moved onto memorizing lemmas and their proofs in preparation for Gauss' Great Theorem. She was curious about how Lenalee was doing, and what topic she'd picked to research, and whether she was thinking about mathematics at all or if she'd agreed only out of pity. It didn't seem like something Lenalee would do, but Mia wasn't certain of her ability to judge people either, so that was another question she'd have to ask when she got home.

 _Home,_ she realized with panic and longing, _is no longer Vienna. I'm letting go of it and it is not unhelpful._

* * *

The liner tipped almost imperceptibly to the south, but it was enough to alert the crew that something was very, very wrong. Mia lay awake at 4 am trying desperately to sleep, her thoughts tracing the same circle for the fifth time, when a passenger finally noticed the captain's head was a cannon and started screaming.

Mia activated her Innocence out of habit, then almost screamed herself seeing a bright patch of pink to the front of the ship. It was impossible because she hadn't seen it that afternoon.

Evariste was already crouched fearfully in his box so she closed the little hatch to keep him from doing anything stupid, before leaving her body and cartwheeling through layers of metal frame to get to the demon. It was a level-one, and if her fears were correct it had been created only a few hours – or even minutes – prior. This meant that the Millenium Earl itself had graced the ship with its presence, not more than a hundred or so metres away from her. Sure, the maker wasn't known to ever attack Exorcists, but neither was it something you could rely on to be predictable. Mia wasn't even certain if she was equipped to fight a being like that, when her Innocence was so precisely designed to free human souls, not destroy things. Besides, she'd probably need three tons of nitroglycerin to even ruffle it's coattails.

Not that explosives were a terrible idea. If a revolver was enough to kill a nearly-level-thee, how much dynamite would it take to defeat an actual level three? _I need data_ _and an analyst, then the world_ _w_ _ill be_ _mine_ _._ _I mean saved. Then the world will be saved._

* * *

Thanks to a team of survivors, the necessary hatches were locked and corridors evacuated to allow the ship to stay afloat and people alive, at least while the lifeboats were filled and flares were sent up. She even managed to salvage a whole backpack of her belongings, including Evariste. The demon had managed to make a sieve of a lot of walls; an efficient way to murder everyone on board without wasting too many bullets. Though it probably wasn't aware, the Earl did more than just kill a few people – Mia's mind became progressively more unhinged while she slowly realized just how close she'd come to facing the evil sorcerer. The Earl was a god-like creature, something on par with the one that created Innocence. Mia's power was precisely a one hundred and ninth of that. It would be so easy for it to win if it stopped creating demons and decided to murder all the Exorcists instead.

 _Then I'm living only because the Earl prefers to create rather than destroy. Lenalee, Olivia, everyone back at the Order lives at the mercy of the being we profess to fight against._

She curled up on the floor of the little life-boat with Ev snuggled safely in her arms, and hoped that when the time came for her to stop existing she would be sure that Olivia, at least, was safe.

* * *

Some motherly soul had noticed that she was a rather damaged child travelling on her own and decided to temporarily adopt her. Mia had tried assuring the woman that she was fine – that she wasn't even an orphan – but even at the port in Ireland when a Finder greeted her warmly, The Parent insisted on escorting her safely to the train station. Mia couldn't remember her name, but decided against asking this time since their acquaintance wouldn't last long enough for her to need it anyway.

The woman was cheerful and reminded her of Nessa, which in turn reminded her of Hrebenne. Mia asked the Finder what was happening in Canada.

"You mean the new Exorcists?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't really know, but it's very exciting isn't it? Someone said there were five of them! Five new recruits! We're bound to gain the upper hand now."

 _Recruits?_ Mia had never wanted to stab someone more than she did then. Her new parent eyed the Finder questioningly, so they introduced themselves to each other while Mia ignored them in favor of reading the train timetable she'd been given by a policeman. The rescue boat had taken the survivors to a different country than they were meant to land in and, mysteriously, the town was doing everything it could to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Thus, instead of being offered soup and a hotel, they were handed an outline of a map to the train station.

"Well aren't you a grown up little girl?" The Parent cooed at her, looking over her shoulder as she searched for the right train. If Mia didn't know better she'd have assumed the woman was being sarcastic.

"I'm sixteen," she replied as dryly as she knew how to, rounding her age up because it was convenient. She realized belatedly that stating their age angrily was precisely what children tended to do.

"Of course! Sixteen and already saving lives! Extraordinary!"

* * *

"Where are you going again?" Mia ignored most of what the Parent said, but it didn't seem to work very well as an offensive tactic. She was still very aware that the Earl of the Millenium existed somewhere on Earth, and that she had so little power that it did not even consider her a threat.

"Portugal!" The woman looked about suddenly, as if for the first time realizing where she was. The skin round her eyes was crinkling. "But I think I'll take a hike across Ireland first, seems a _lovely_ place."

"Then take care," Mia told her, "watch out for demons."

She shook her head.

"From what I hear," she replied, still in a patronising tone of voice, "I couldn't stop one from killing me anyway. So, honestly, there's little sense in worrying!"

"But..." The logic was surprisingly undeniable.

"Thank you for keeping us safe, Mia." The Parent crouched down so that she was eye-level with her and took hold of her shoulders in her cold, wrinkled hands. Mia couldn't speak because there was a person looking into her eyes who was about to hike across a country and see it in all it's spring-time glory, only because she had saved her life.

She imagined that drowning was ten times worse than choking on the fiery dust of dead people.

The woman hugged her, and for once in her life Mia didn't flinch at the warmth of another human being. Her breath shuddered past a lump in her throat as she tried to remember reasons to still be distasteful of her power.

"What's your name?" She asked instead of attempting to acknowledge the unnecessary gratitude. The Parent let her go and didn't shake her head or sigh like Nathanael had.

"It's Sophie Rose. Best wishes darling."

Then she left and Mia had to cry on her own.


	15. Singularity Theorems

I'm sorry this is so late, there was a character name emergency that totally ruined everything.

It is difficult to write a story that involves so many characters if the main character dislikes social interaction. So mostly it's just this.

* * *

The trivial group.

* * *

Armed with the awareness that Olivia could be turned into a pile of ash at the Earl's whim, Mia did not even have to fake emotion at their reunion. She held onto her friend for the whole time it took to travel from London to HQ, listening to a lullaby of new discoveries in statistical analysis.

"Komui went on a rampage when he heard you had a heart attack," Olivia said suddenly and Mia felt herself grow cold with dread. _Not now, Olivia, please don't ask me what happened._ "Not a literal rampage like he does, but he took a whole day off just to yell at the phone."

"I didn't realize he cared so much," she murmured, hoping to throw Olivia off topic.

"Are you kidding? He's like, the Chief Worrier. Which is good, because he happens to have power enough to make Central listen."

"Yes. It's astonishing how such a good person managed to climb that high," Mia mused, remembering what Nathanael had said about Order politics. Olivia elbowed her for the pessimism, then proceeded to shred her fingernails with her teeth in the subsequent silence.

Mia stared out the window, terrified at the questions that never came. She ran her fingers up and down the scar on her palm, wishing that it would rain so that Olivia, too, would feel miserable.

* * *

It wasn't just the endless medical tests and experimentation that drove Mia back to daytime pyjama wearing, it was the boredom. Her greatest resentment was that she had so little time in this world and yet she was wasting it twirling in circles on a skateboard until she was dizzy.

She finished _Differential Geometry_ and started searching for a text on group theory more accessible than those papers that she had stolen from the Science Division (which had perished when the ship sank along with most of her belongings). This turned out to be a pretty difficult task because group theorists were few and most didn't know enough grammar to write a book.

 _This is boring._

She wanted to learn how to fight but she wasn't sure who to ask. When she joined, they'd assigned her to General Yeegar, probably because he was the closest to an academic that they had, but none of the Generals were ever at HQ for more than a few days a month.

She _could_ ask Lenalee, but she felt like it would be too much to expect of her. Eventually she had to admit that her inability to make friends was inconvenient. Olivia was busy living her dreams, and Mia felt like the most useless person in existence. The clear path that she'd always planned to follow had been gone for more than half a year and she was still derailed like a pathetic little child. All she knew how to do was yell curses into the void.

Komui didn't want to send her on a mission. In fact, he didn't want her activating her Innocence at all unless it was under controlled conditions in the laboratory, but she'd forsaken her heart long ago. If she wanted it to, her Innocence could mimick the effect of gravity, so that when she threw her soul off the tower she could pretend that death was waiting at the bottom of the cliff.

No light reached into the damp, oppressive earth she fell into, and the darkness was so absolute that it might as well have been the pitch black void she'd imagined the end to be.

* * *

This activity was a plausible form of entertainment until the one day she found Sparrow sitting on a statue of some dead general that Mia had forgotten the name of. Both of them were staring at her. For a moment, Mia thought she was back in Hrebenne because that's where Sparrow was, saving the town from corrupt politicians...

"What the fuck are you doing?" The acrobat asked, unimpressed. Mia jumped, then froze in surprize seeing the HQ tower to her left.

"What?" she gasped, reality suddenly slamming her in the face. _Sparrow doesn't belong here, she should be in Hrebenne, why isn't she in Hrebenne?_

"You know," Sparrow began, straightening to stand on the head of the statue, then hopping lightly into the air. Mia held her breath but the somersault that followed was naturally perfect and beautiful. "That day in Hrebenne?" She wasn't exhibiting any sign that somersaults were difficult and it was infuriating. "I thought I'd imagined it but… you didn't really want to survive, did you?"

 _How is this relevant_ _and_ _what are you doing here?_ Mia shook her head, then realized that Sparrow had worded the question ambiguously enough to require actual words to answer. If she answered, maybe the girl would leave her alone forever.

"I didn't _want_ to die." The fact that she could see Sparrow's face was unnerving – she was accustomed to watching an expressionless, twisted vine climbing around the eyes of a mask, and seeing a human being was an entirely different experience.

Sparrow had once again cornered her without needing any corners.

"I have a friend here," Mia conceded eventually, "I promised her that I'd come back."

Sparrow looked like she wanted to say something terrible, very loudly, which is why Mia deactivated her Innocence. She jumped off her bed and double checked the lock on the door, then the window, drew the curtains closed and sat in the darkest corner between the wardrobe and an adjacent wall.

 _Sparrow is going to be an Exorcist, this is actually happening and it's my fault._

She brought her hands up to her ears, hugging her head, and pretended that the world didn't exist.

* * *

Olivia's silhouette appeared in front of a sunset, like a beautiful, monstrous dragon to drag her back to reality again, with a box of baklava and a teapot.

They spread a teatowel between them on the edge of Hevlaska's elevator and set out the picnic in silence. Olivia conveniently forgot to talk about the new Exorcists, until Mia couldn't stand it anymore and asked,

"How many of them came?"

"Four," she answered immediately.

 _That's all of them, Dominique included. Damn._

"It's getting awfully crowded here."

Olivia gave her a withering look.

"You should talk to them; Chalker even asked if you're here."

"Cha-what?" _Ah, right, they_ _most likely_ _gave their real names._ The revelation was somewhat disappointing and she decided to ignore it. "Anyway, I _have_ talked to them. One of them."

"And then you hid in your room pretending not to exist!"

Mia didn't respond, but she took a sip of tea in an attempt to be calm and collected about the whole thing. The last time most of the Wizards saw her, she was almost dead and she did not want their concern, or their pity, or their friendship. In addition, she found it confusing what Sparrow wanted from her, the acrobat's questions were always uncomfortably personal. They shouldn't be at the Black Order at all.

"Do you want me to have a talk with them?" Olivia offered quietly, like she really didn't want to. Mia was certain that Olivia could make it so she never saw the Wizards smile again but she wasn't sure if that was exactly what she wanted. She declined the offer mostly out of pride.

* * *

They ambushed her in the cafeteria, making snide remarks about her eating habits, punctuated with Dominique's assurances that she was digging herself a grave. Mia knew she wouldn't survive long enough for it to matter, and said so.

"I'm not going to save you next time if it's your fault," Dominique told her. Mia rewarded her threat with a grin and pushed her plate away.

"Don't worry –" she murmured, "my eulogy is already written."

Nessa attempted to steer the conversation away from death and asked Cirri about the weather, but the girl was too nervous to speak with Mia being present. It was strangely satisfying to be considered a scary person, so she made no attempt to make Cirri feel more comfortable. The other three Wizards made up for it by laughing too loudly – they had camaraderie enough for an army – and their friendship was almost infectious. Without masks, they looked just like people; like all the other people that Mia could never belong with.

She left the table as soon as her dessert was cold, quietly and without saying goodbye removing herself from the room. She made it to the roof of the tower before realizing that Sparrow had followed her.

"You're very sneaky," Mia told her, without bothering to make eye contact. It was easier to talk into the air.

"And you're a ghost."

"What?"

"You're very good at disappearing."

"Thanks."

"I'd call it running away."

Mia walked to the edge and sat between two battlements, feeling dizzy from the height. The bottom of the cliff was hardly visible from there, it faded into the ever-present British fog. Sparrow perched on a battlement beside her, then swung her feet down as well. Mia wanted to ask why the acrobat had followed her but was afraid of being left alone.

"How did… how did you end up with the Wizards?" she asked instead. She couldn't remember the last time she'd tried to make conversation for the sake of conversation and found it nerve-wracking and difficult. Sparrow was quiet for a while, enjoying Mia's discomfort.

"It's easier to be with people who see the same world as you." The vague answer made her realize that she wanted to know the story and it upset her that Sparrow denied her that. Asking for more would feel like prying.

"Nobody does, though," Mia muttered, "and why did you have to come here? You clearly said that you wanted nothing to do with the Order."

"I don't like running," Sparrow said quickly, turning to look at her so suddenly that Mia had to meet her eyes. "Why does Olivia call you Edith?"

Mia frowned angrily at the foggy abyss. "I don't know, that's not my name." She needed to find Olivia and have a talk with her but sitting in front of the emptiness with another person was comforting. She decided to continue to flow of questions and answers because it was an easy kind of conversation to make. "How was your party? I forgot to go."

Sparrow laughed, loudly, hitting her heels on the stone wall.

"Yeah right… but it _was_ pretty horrible." She sighed. "They mean well don't they?"

"It's still okay to hate them."

"Sure, but that's never any fun unless they hate you back."

* * *

There was giggling, and a 'shh', then 'are you sure she's awake?' before a knock on Mia's door. She looked up from her diary and sat as still as she could, trying to make her heart beat silently.

"Mia? Open the door." It was Olivia's voice, but Mia didn't like Olivia when she was surrounded by her friends. Whoever they were at the time.

She heard another knock, the rapping of it sending her head spinning with fear. Attempting to avoid passing out, Mia took several slow, deep breaths and counted to ten.

"Mia, we're going to set off some fireworks on the field out over the cliff, do you want to come?" Lenalee seemed to have no aversion to talking through the door. Mia continued to be still and almost jumped out of her skin when a sheet of paper blew off her desk onto the floor with a breeze from the open window. "You can join us later, then, just come when you're ready."

"Mia, don't be ridiculous." Someone knocked on her door again.

Mia really didn't like Olivia right then. She listened to the fireworks from afar, exactly like echoes of gunshots that reminded her of watching Akuma explode. The yearning to see the coloured lights spill across the sky gave rise to a horrible kind of hopeless self-hatred that was not easier to bear despite it's familiarity. She drew her curtains against the flashes and hummed to herself to drown out the sound of doomed children laughing in wonder. Mia felt like she was the only one there who couldn't pretend to not be aware of their impending death. How to smile truthfully at life was a skill so far beyond her that seeing others manage it effortlessly only assured her that they were insane.


	16. Glass Jigsaw

Ok, I did a word count and there are three more chapters after this one (they just need editing), and then it is finished! To be honest it would make just as much sense if the story started at chapter 15, probably, but that's just what happens to stories of mine that don't have a plot! They just end! Next month is Christmas and New Year and then EXAMS, so if you still have any expectations of the next chapters being uploaded on schedule then you are an optimist and I envy you.

Warning for violence, language and death.

The little paragraphs in italics are supposed to be narrated by the Mysterious Narrator, in case you were wondering. I thought it would be more fun to not have to read the backstory all in one go.

* * *

Streets paved with leaves of linden trees.

* * *

Eventually, Mia was released from the medical examinations (with a list of recommended lifestyle changes hilariously similar to her own list) and sent on a mission. It was a dreary misunderstanding, in a jealous country with great pavements. What they had suspected to be Innocence turned out to be an exceptionally skilled violinist who liked to preach.

Upon her return, she found the Wizards gone, and a hand-painted postcard addressed to her sitting on its own in her pigeon hole.

 _Dear Mia,_

 _Pictures can't capture how beautiful Ireland is –_

 _thank you for allowing me to see it._

 _Sophie Rose_

"You're getting _fanmail?_ "

"Fuck you."

Somehow, the red-headed creep had overheard her telling Olivia about Sophie Rose. Mia had only mentioned it because Sophie Rose wasn't real unless someone else validated that the postcard did, in fact, exist.

Further confirming her opinion of him, Lavi sat down at their table completely uninvited. He just smiled at her vulgar words, ignoring her in favour of staring at Olivia, as Mia made a disgusted sound and waved her hands in a shooing motion.

"Hey Olive—iia," he greeted her, with a quick, nervous glance at Mia. Mia was unduly impressed that he remembered.

"Junior." Olivia inclined her head coldly. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"Nope!" He seemed to enjoy making people uncomfortable, which made Mia feel a little bad about her own habit of doing just that. "I wanted a chat with Mia."

Mia flinched. Lavi's hair swished when he turned to face her, because he broke all the rules including gravity.

"Why?" She asked slowly, before Olivia could speak for her. Olivia seemed to be enjoying this too, or she would have repeated her un-welcoming in a more direct manner. Mia continued on the defensive, "I thought I made it clear that I dislike you."

Lavi chuckled amiably, taking the statement as a mediocre joke. Mia picked up a blueberry and armed her spoon with it, using the edge of the table as a pivot.

"You're actually the second person to say that to me today!"

She looked across the cafeteria towards where Kanda usually sat and lo and behold; he was there looking as annoyed as she felt. She got the disconcerting impression that maybe she _could_ get along with the guy – being continually insulted for having emotions was better than listening to anything Lavi ever said. They could plot his death together.

"I thought it'll be good to get to know each other before our mission! Y'know, so that we don't die!"

 _'Before our mission'._

"Wh..."

"Oh shit," Olivia said suddenly, stealing the words from Mia, "sorry, I meant to tell you..." She hung her head, but Mia was still struck speechless by disbelief. She whimpered softly, dropping the cutlery catapult. The blueberry rolled sadly across the floor and under her bench.

"Don't be like that! It's going to be fun." His facade seemed to fall for a moment, giving way to sarcasm but Mia was too preoccupied to notice. She clutched at straws.

"Please tell me Lenalee is coming too. Or anyone."

"She's babysitting the newbies." Lavi looked like he wished he was also still a newbie. Mia sighed and decided against her will to continue eating her lunch.

"Remember, Mia," Olivia advised, "if he's bleeding to death it's okay to leave him."

"That's harsh!"

Her friend smiled sweetly as Mia laughed.

"It's going to be fine." _Fuck that. If I'm going to be_ _better at living_ _I need to learn diplomacy._ "Yes, it's going to be _fine_ _._ "

* * *

 _47 years ago, a foolish soldier cursed God and He, in righteous anger, cast His own curse one hundred times as terrible._

* * *

Missions were often just hunting trips disguised as puzzles – it was the wonderful silver lining of being an Exorcist – and Mia could risk her life to solve a puzzle without a second thought.

Köveskál was of particular interest as it was host to an uninvited forest of dying lime trees. Their roots arched above the ground like they were trying to dig themselves out of their graves to reach for help. Mia looked carefully inside the branches and found not a trace of water.

"They really are all the same," Bookman remarked. He meant this specifically, because the lindens were not just like siblings – they were identical copies of each other, down to the veins on the bark.

It unsettled her, so Mia reached for the closest branch and snapped off a twig. She was delicate but it crumbled in her hand like a sandcastle and fell through her fingers leaving only a faint dusting of death. When she looked back, the branch had re-grown in a matter of seconds.

 _Breathe_

"Let's keep moving," she advised and backed off the meadow towards the path. The first task was to search for the Finders who went missing while investigating the village, though that was merely a formality. It was most likely that they were dead and because of the disintegrating effect of the Akuma virus it would be difficult to even find corpses.

* * *

 _The soldier's wife held nothing dear except for her only daughter, whose name was Grace. Tragedy followed them both._

* * *

Fearing that the village was going to be hostile, Mia decided to approach it in spirit form first.

She couldn't see any Akuma, and everything was in ordinary, blurry full-colour. The streets were empty, and the church had been taken apart stone by stone and assembled into several oblique, square based pyramids. Spiders crawled in and out of cracks. The church had been small and only a few moss-eaten planks of wood remained of the pews.

A movement drew her attention to one of the structures; a crow had been startled and took a hopeful flight towards the sky before a gunshot brought it down. The shot echoed across the street. Someone whimpered softly behind the stones at the sound – a small, frightened child trying not to breathe.

Mia couldn't see any Akuma souls, which meant that both the shooter and the kid were human. Before she could decide if she should intervene, the kid dived out of his hiding place and sprinted in the direction of the forest; Mia screamed at him to stop but he was already in plain sight of the sniper. One shot, two shots, three, smashing glass.

"No, no, no," she closed her eyes, hearing a shrill yell. A quieter sound of rustling leaves betrayed the killer's position.

The shooter dropped down from her position on a tree branch and slowly approached the church so Mia removed her revolver from her bag and aimed it at her head. She could make the woman want to die, she could bring her soul to the brink of destruction and then let her live in despair until the rest of her snapped.

The kid was motionless, face down with blood beneath him spread like wings, but the sniper walked slowly without so much as a sound, rifle at the ready. They walked over broken glass, but what Mia had assumed were smashed stained windows turned out to be curved, sharp pieces of a jar.

She smiled; the jar had contained blood.

The sniper, unaware of this, nudged the boy's foot with her own, and when he didn't stir she carefully lowered the rifle and drew a carving knife from a toolbelt. Fourth shot, fifth, sixth, and just like that she was dead.

The kid shook with laughter, still lying on the ground and hugging a colt to his chest as the sniper twitched and bled out next to him. Mia wasn't certain what she felt but it wasn't the horror that she'd reserved for watching people die during an Akuma attack. This was a _person_ , killing another.

She stayed only long enough to watch the boy take the knife from the dead woman's hand and start carving off her head.

* * *

 _Grace's mother died of a common illness, while the soldier was travelling across the country in search of a doctor. Upon his return, he bought three barrels of gunpowder and destroyed a nearby Shrine._

* * *

Mia returned to her body and immediately threw up on the grass. It was clearer now, the sound of a dull blade crunching bones beneath it and how the veins and tendons snapped, and she was suddenly thankful that the Akuma virus left nothing but a pile of dust in its wake so that she didn't have to see blood often.

"Are you okay?"

She rinsed her mouth and spat, then wished that she could skip this mission.

"No," she said. The Bookmen clearly wanted to know what it was that she'd seen but were too polite to ask. It was so easy to make curious people miserable, "there's something _really wrong_ with this place," she explained, shivering, "I hope."

It was hard to put into words exactly why seeing the inside of someone's throat was so horrifying.

* * *

 _It had been Grace's favourite place in the whole world. She had knelt there for three hours each day praying to the Mother of God for her own mother's health._

* * *

Köveskál was like a clock that didn't tick – profoundly disturbing. It reminded her of watching the rain from inside a moving train, if the rain had been acid slowly eating it's way through the roof. Silence was the lack of sound, and that particular silence traveled perfectly through the countryside, always beneath all other noise. Mia waded through such tautological explanations in her head, attempting to understand why she was perpetually feeling like everyone was about to die. She feared to make sound. Safe places did not exist in this universe.

 _You're pathetic,_ she told herself, _and death is going to be good for you. Once you're dead no-one can hurt you, once your soul is destroyed not even the_ Earl of the Millenium _will be able to find you._

She screamed in her head to drown out her own voice but it didn't work. It wasn't her voice; it was clear, loud, and it spoke over every other sound. _It's fine! Death is nice! Death is peace._ Clutching desperately at her hair, she attempted to detach herself from her head, then realized that the only way out was _out._

Mia activated her Innocence and tumbled out of herself through spiderweb. The voice was silent. The setting sun was stabbing the windows to her room, then falling in heaps of dust motes to the floor.

"You can't have my soul," she said out loud, "even if I hate it."

Her body was motionless, but it didn't feel _hers_. There was the slight possibility that the voice had been something alien, and she realized suddenly that she could never be sure. She couldn't go back. How could she ever return to a mind that was home to an invisible monster?

It might not even exist.

Mia took an unnecessary, shuddering breath to calm herself.

They were staying in a village ten miles away from Köveskál. The place was as normal as the countryside can be, with neither magical trees nor solid brick polyhedra and no-one in sight carried a rifle. The Bookmen decided it was reasonably safe, and Mia tried not to be too paranoid.

Now she sat opposite her own body pointing a revolver at it.

* * *

 _When the Maker came to visit, Grace recognized his sorcery immediately. While her mother's spirit was made to kill every person rebuilding the Shrine, Grace fought to destroy the Maker's machine._

* * *

A consistent knocking startled her out of a heavy slumber. She was curled up against the headboard, still wearing her uniform, but she couldn't remember falling asleep.

"Mia?" Lavi's voice was muffled by the door. "Are you okay?" It sounded like he was about to attempt knocking the door down, which meant he'd been trying to wake her for ages. The room was dark but judging by the length of shadows falling across the fields outside it was a long time past dawn.

"I'm _fine_!" She crawled off the bed and stumbled towards the door but decided against ever reaching it, opting for the floor instead. Lavi didn't sound convinced, but she couldn't blame him because Mia wasn't either. She pressed her forhead to the cool wood.

She felt exactly like she had the day Ethel died, when she'd opened her eyes to see a floor dusted with corpse matter after the first time she'd activated her Innocence. It had felt like downing half a bottle of whisky.

"Give me a minute," she asked, "I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"Okay then, we're waiting in the pub so join us when you can."

"Sure."

The last time this happened it had taken seventeen hours of sleep to feel normal again. She didn't _have_ seventeen hours, not unless she wanted the world to know just how pathetic she was.

"Fuck you, Innocence."

Her revolver was under her pillow, so she pulled it out and considered shooting through the window to see what it would sound like. It would be like fireworks, and the clinking of glasses at a party. Too loud, too much attention. Turning a journal page into a mess of black squiggles was a wiser option.

She had stayed up for hours, too frightened of the alien voice to even think about deactivating her Innocence until she inevitably fell asleep. The consequences hadn't even crossed her mind. Now that she'd returned to her own head it felt incomprehensible that something other could reach into it, it was a stupid idea. She had underestimated her imagination and once again fallen prey to fear.

 _You're supposed to be indestructible,_ she reminded herself, in her own voice. It sounded nothing like the words she'd heard yesterday, there were no promises that death was an excellent solution to everything. _Sure, sorcery is a thing, magic is real, but my mind will always be my own._

* * *

 _In her search for the right magic, Grace cursed her birthplace, Köveskál. The villagers turned on each other, as people are wont to do._

* * *

That day, they came across the dead Finders. Mia noticed a broken talisman lying a few feet away from an unnatural looking pile of rocks, and Lavi found a tiny cross engraved on one of them. It was a strange, hesistant expression of shame for a mass grave.

"'Nameless soldiers,'" Bookman read from another stone, "'God save my soul.'"

"' _My_ soul'?" Lavi narrowed his eyes. It made more sense to Mia because she had already extrapolated yesterday's events to the rest of the village. They could all be murderers for all she knew.

"I don't think it was Akuma that killed them," she said.

"Of course it wasn't," he snapped, and she flinched at the sudden and unexpected show of sincere annoyance.

"Don't say that," Mia shook her head. It was so much better if no one besides her thought like that. "I don't know the kinds you've met but _people_ don't do things like this."

She could still see the kid yesterday, laughing in a pool of alien blood. It had been hard to read the exact expression on his face but it wasn't happiness and he hadn't laughed when he picked up the knife.

Lavi didn't reply because he knew she was lying. She felt defensive of humanity, suddenly, faced with a person who appreciated it possibly even less than her. It was confusing, and it was also the kind of thing that _shouldn't_ have been confusing. She looked at Bookman, who was frowning at the talisman and not listening. He probably thought the same but he didn't look as if he cared.

"Not without good reason," she allowed, and then quietly, "they must have had a good reason."

"You think there are ' _good reasons'_ for mass murder?" His glance was briefly whithering, and then he smiled. Mia shuddered and looked away.

 _I do though, don't I?_

"No," she murmured, crouching down to inspect the little carved cross. "But I think there's hope and redemption and shit like that."

The carving was shallow and could have been either a meaningful gesture from an unskilled person, or a crappy apology from a talented sculptor. Insufficient data.

"There's more to this than people." Bookman had dismantled the talisman and seemed to have come to some sort of conclusion. "They were fighting against Akuma."

"But there weren't any in the village," Mia informed them, "and why would people be killing _each other_ when there were already monsters after them?"

The question was too complicated to be taken seriously, but the mystery of Köveskál could bring her closer to understanding and Mia found that it was excellent motivation for finding the solution.

From what they could discern, nobody in the neighbouring villages had ever even _heard_ of it, but the place was clearly marked on the maps in the parish office. They asked about the Finders, and someone helpfully pointed them towards where Köveskál was supposed to be. He spoke only Hungarian and therefore Mia only pretended to understand it until Bookman noticed and started murmuring translations to her.

"Yeh, people keep coming through and asking about it, but there's nothing there... Never come back so I reckon they give up. What're you looking for anyway, is it treasure or something?"

"Nothing of the kind! We're looking for monsters." Apparently, Lavi was faking a Russian accent and it was confusing the hell out of everyone. He seemed to find it hilarious.

"You said you're Exorcists, right," the villager suddenly lowered his voice conspiratorially, "there was talk of a… an ungodly creature, so to say." It was hard to take him seriously because he was so stereotypically a _Villager_. Pitchfork and dog at his side. "There used to be a shrine there, see, a massive old thing, used to bring folk in from all'owr I heard. Then after the revolution some poor bastard blew it up with gunpowder, he got shot later 'course, or so the stories tell." The dog wondered by their feet, with long blonde fur and ears that were lost in its mane. "I was just a kid back then, I don't remember exactly how it went, but they say a lotta folk died trying to rebuild it."

"Died?"

"Mauled by a wild animal, they say, but that's just bullshit. There was nothing left of them, no bones, _nothing_."

Mia crouched down to be closer to the dog's level. She had never liked dogs because their unrelenting loyalty made her uncomfortable, but this one was too beautiful to ignore. As Lavi and Bookman continued to question the owner, Mia stretched out a hand towards the creature. It sniffed it for a moment, leaving a disgusting thin patch of wetness, then approached closer.

She stroked it's head with a feeling of accomplishment, but she was also unsettled because it would always be dependent on human beings. How unfair that it could be happy only while it's owners were around. How unfair that humans could call themselves owners of living things. She thought of Evariste and decided re-think it later.

"He says her name's Lena," Bookman relayed.

Mia found herself face to face with the villager, who was gently leading Lena away from them, having bid the Exorcists farewell.

"That's nice."

As usual, there had been a booklet of useful Hungarian phrases attached to the mission brief, and this was the only expression of appreciation Mia could remember. She wanted to say more but eventually settled for patting her on the head gently and whispering, _be happy, Lena._


	17. Sunrise

I do not own DGM.

* * *

 _Grace kept returning to the Shrine, where only a single wild rose bush remained. She took care of it, and in return it gave her power._

* * *

Predictably, nobody knew the identity of the man who blew up the shrine except that he was a soldier, so they decided to search for the ruins themselves. Maps indicated that it was in a small forest adjacent to Köveskál. So far approaching the village had proven dangerous so they went carefully, stumbling upon more mass graves each decorated with a Black Order rose cross.

Three teams had been sent to the village, and three graves were found. On the last the cross stood upright, precariously balanced on the top stone and held up by nothing but air. The area was enclosed by a flat arc of stone foundations, almost invisible beneath bright green moss and beautiful but unusual species of flowers. In the centre, a wild rose bush bloomed among leaves left over from last autumn.

They had found the Shrine.

"Hey! There's a hand there!" Lavi dropped to his knees beside the rose bush and pulled aside the branches to reveal a small, white porcelain hand, then rescued the rest of the statue.

"Mary."

Mia activated her Innocence, but Mary's robes were still blue, and the snake was still a greener shade of black. She looked at the pile of stones where the Finders were buried, but those were grey so it was hard to tell. The subtle scrapes of rust, however, were exactly the same. There was more blur than usual, and a lot of the objects were phasing into one another. Every edge disintegrated.

"Mia!"

She fell face down, immediately deactivating her Innocence and feeling exceptionally stupid about it. The moss was cool and soft though, with tiny stalks in it that looked like a pathetic attempt at flowering.

"It's fine. There is no fragment here," she said gently, into the moss. It smelled like the mouldy books of her grandmother's library and something burnt.

Lavi moved to help her stand but she turned and kicked at his shin before he could get too close. She continued the conversation sitting down.

"I can't see it. No Akuma either."

"Are you sure?" Bookman looked down at her somewhat harshly. "We should come back tomorrow, it is clear that you need rest, Miss Mia."

"No, I _clearly_ do not. Look, I'm standing up now, I'm fine... I can see perfectly well, and the Innocence is _not here_ so we should move on."

* * *

 _The rose provided Grace with the power she needed to save her mother's soul from the Maker's clutches. Neither cared that Köveskál remained cursed._

* * *

The key was finding someone native to Köveskál who was not a homicidal maniac or a corpse. They circled the village, but most of the windows had been boarded up and the rest were smashed and belonged to completely empty houses.

"This is just weird," Lavi was looking at the sky as if he was expecting it to fall. "Usually we get attacked by Akuma at this point."

He was ignored, and so continued speaking, "most strange places have a pretty sizeable population."

"Maybe they found the cause and it wasn't Innocence," Mia suggested, bored to death by her own words, "so they left. If people are already shooting at each other the village is basically an Akuma factory. Like Calgary."

"Calgary?"

"Yeah, that's just one example – it happens a lot. The Science Division described an idealized mathematical model for it and everything, it's quite clever."

"Which doesn't explain the trees and everything else," Bookman reminded them, "there are dangers on this planet other than Akuma."

* * *

 _Grace, her mother, and the silver tree watched with interest as the village divided itself, and the fort-dwellers built their walls. Many tried to leave, but a circular path always brought them back._

* * *

Köveskál was to the East of the Shrine, but the West of the village was bordered entirely by meadows. A thin, disused path led deeper into the country, and the identical lindens stood guard alongside. Several hectares away the Exorcists saw smoke.

"It's a fort!" Lavi whispered loudly when they got closer. It was becoming apparent that Lavi had a knack for saying obvious things. As if in solidarity, Bookman and Mia both ignored him.

Mia was having a hard time hearing anything the Bookmen were saying. It took an enormous amount of effort just to navigate the stony path without tripping or sinking into a puddle and right then she could concentrate on only one task at a time. Everything else blurred and twisted itself into surreality.

Bookman had obviously thought this through, so he outlined a plan. It mostly involved talking.

* * *

 _And so 47 years passed and the fields were soaked with blood spilled over and over. When outsiders came, Grace grew frightened of change._

* * *

The Fort was a sturdy albeit medieval structure, with sharpened wooden logs making up much of the defence system. A part of it was built with stone, but the builders had ran out of material before they could complete more than five metres, or were still in the process of improving it. The gate was reinforced with iron that looked like it had been imperfectly melted down twice before being fastened to the wood.

Three watchtowers stood high above the wall and the buildings. Since the fort had been built on a hill with a dry moat cirling it (there was a tiny river nearby that exhibited signs of being rerouted), it was likely that the Exorcists had been spotted long before. Nobody came out to attack or greet them so maybe they were also scheming the best approach to this situation. There was one man visible between the battlements on the front-most tower, pointing a crossbow at them very intently.

Lavi yelled something at him in Hungarian. Mia flinched at the raised voice; she wanted to scream to drown out the answer, but that would be even louder so all she could do was cover her ears and concentrate on the meadow in front of her. It grew so quietly. She imagined she was at HQ, sitting on the elevator surrounded by emptiness and silence, but without Olivia present it was pointless.

The man on the tower was soon joined by another, this one in a hat. There was some more yelling on behalf of both sides, to which Bookman joined in also, but Mia was too busy trying to break a stalk of grass to take much notice. The presence of a linden behind her was both comforting and unsettling. It was rare that a problem could be solved by setting it on fire so it was important to take note of the opportunity when it came. _With the tree's recovery rate as it_ _is_ _, it might be possible to make it burn forever_ , she thought.

She managed to whittle part of the stalk away to tear it off the rest of the plant and repeated the action with two more, then arranged them into a set of Borromean rings. Ethel had made them with silver necklaces, back when they were little and mostly looked at the pictures in their geometry books. Edith had been fascinated, hopeful. _One day,_ her sister had said, _this will seem trivial._

The yelling continued, until the gate opened a crack and the man in the hat creeped out. He looked tired, Mia thought, and like he would rather stab people than talk to them. She felt the same.

The Fort only contained one proper building besides the watch towers, the rest were small shacks that were probably used as workshops. The main building was wooden and took up almost half of the space enclosed by the walls.

As the Exorcists made their way inside they smelled smoke, but no fire seemed to be burning. The hat-wearer led them to a tiny hut furnished only with a table, arranged with maps and chess pieces. Three other people were standing around, smoking and laughing, but they quietened suddenly when the Exorcists entered. Looks were exchanged, smoking pipes forgotten. One of them spoke a single word of Hungarian, in a whisper. Mia glanced at Bookman.

"Outsiders," he said.

The hat-wearer adjusted his hat and leaned at the head of the table. Mia desperately wanted to sit on the floor and fall asleep. _Once they start_ _shouting_ _again,_ she thought, _I can disappear._

* * *

 _The outsiders asked questions, and spoke of a senseless war between a sorcerer and a god. Grace, who abhored war, fed their souls to the wild rose because the silver tree was weakened with age._

* * *

Mia woke before dawn, when it was quiet except for a continuous chirping of birds. She couldn't remember going to sleep, but it didn't matter anymore. Everything was going to be fine, she could remember saying that before the mission. It felt like a promise.

The world was visible only by the moonlight that streamed through a window but she could see that the room she was in was closer to a cupboard in size, and only contained crates. It was cold, because someone had taken her shoes off.

"Curse you," she said to that person, stuffing her feet back into her boots. She found her bag next to the crates she'd been sleeping on and wrapped herself in a thicker coat before leaving the room. Only three people were awake besides her, on the watchtowers, but they couldn't hear her hum songs because of how loud the birds were. Her watch showed 3:43.

Mia looked up to see the sky dotted with unfamiliar stars. It took her a while to find the big dipper because she had no idea of the directions, but eventually figured out where she was and noticed that the house was facing north pretty much exactly. The square was a labirynth of vegetable patches and paths winding between them. A dog was sleeping near the gate, breathing slowly. Mia wanted to approach it but had a feeling it would rip her to shreds if she disturbed its sleep.

She found a ladder leaning against the wall and climbed to the battlements. They were just wide enough to walk on sideways, until it widened near the tower accessible by another ladder. The villager standing guard watched her suspiciously as she climbed, not even breaking eye contact when she glared at him.

When she reached the little ledge she asked whether he spoke German. He tipped his head from side to side, then said,

"Not well."

He noted her surprise and explained, looking profoundly uncomfortable, "there is not much to do here. Some people draw, I learn German."

She still had no idea whether he was a murderer or not, but wasn't as willing to believe it seeing him back up against the other side of the tower.

"Good for you. Can you open the gate for me?"

He squinted, confused, then shook his head.

"You will die."

"Right." She rolled her eyes, attempting to look like an indestructible, self-sufficient adult. Judging by his expression it wasn't very effective. "I won't. Open the gate."

She could take care of Akuma, and what could there possibly be out there more dangerous than killing machines powered by human souls?

"Then _we_ will die." He gestured to himself and the whole fort.

"Why?"

He shook his head impatiently and muttered a long sentence of Hungarian. Mia only caught the word _monster_ and suspected the rest was made up of swearing. She knew certain words in a lot of languages thanks to the Order.

"The monster," he said slowly, "will eat us."

Mia doubted that the _monster_ would have any trouble scaling the walls of the fort, but if they'd survived this long then there must be some other point to the barricades. She looked down, judging the distance to the ground. It would be a long fall, even if she climbed back down from the tower.

She considered activating her Innocence and shooting him through the head to make him a little unstable, but that would be actually hurting a person. She wanted to avoid that if she could so she could go back and shower her friends with stories of her heroism and good deeds. Then maybe next time, Central would think before sending her half the world across.

It wasn't like she had any matches anyway, and Mia knew of no other way to start a fire. It would have to wait until morning.

* * *

 _The war eventually returned to Grace, in the form of three powerful priests dressed in black. They trampled over her Shrine, paying no heed to the fragility of the wild rose._

* * *

In the two hours between then and sunrise, her thoughts kept returning to Hrebenne. Looking back on it, she couldn't find any way to blame her failure on the Innocence. She wasn't even sure what it was that she had failed to do. The mission had been to find out what the Wizards were and if they were Acommodators invite them to join the Order. _Probably._ It had been her own agenda that complicated things, technically she hadn't failed the mission at all.

She had failed at something. She remembered what Nathanael had said about orders on the train journey to the branch, ' _if it's in some far-off place, we decide how to carry them out on our own_ _.'_ That was why she found herself drawn to him, the freedom that he weilded, that exact freedom which allowed him to betray her in the end; because he wanted to save the world from monsters; because the world was more important than the lives of a few randomers. How could she ever think that he was any different to anyone at Central?

It was impossible to say she still wanted to be friends with such a person but she missed his voice. She wondered if he was still alive, and whether anyone would think to tell her when he died. Exorcists weren't known to be friends with Finders since the latter died with much greater frequency, so objectively there was no point.

Was she willing to help the Wizards fake their deaths because she disagreed with the Order's philosophy, or because she personally wanted to watch the world fall? Everyone around her seemed to almost furiously _want_ to go on living, despite the impossibility of personal happiness. Maybe she could understand that a little when she traced the scar running down her palm. Other times it was harder.

"Do you like this world?" She asked the man standing guard on the other side of the tower. He was looking West, outside of the fort, while she looked East. She decided that if someone living in an apocalyptic-looking village still wanted the world to exist then she would try to save it.

"I don't understand."

It sounded like something from a phrasebook. She wondered whether it was the language or the question itself that stumped him.

"Do you like Earth? This world." She spread her arms in an arc. "Living in it."

"It is not important." He sighed, then explained, "you think like that because you are young. It is not simple."

Mia gritted her teeth, clenched her fists and tried to reason with the temptation to push the guy off the tower.

"That's a shitty answer."

It was a fine answer, she couldn't argue, but he missed the point of the question. He could have just said _yeah, every day's a blessing,_ and she would have become a saviour of humanity, but he hadn't – he'd called her a child instead.

* * *

"THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THERE?"

The shout startled her from a nonsensical train of thought. She'd put her head in her arms to shield from the sun and it hurt to open her eyes. Squinting, she saw Lavi yelling at her from the ground. He was picking his way carefully through the vegetable garden to the base of her tower, which gave her an idea for how to make his life a little more miserable. She reached carefully for the mug of stale ale that the guard had abandoned earlier.

"Oy, princess," he said with a grin. She grinned back, chucking the mug in the direction of his head. There was only a few inches inside but the way the liquid splashed out in the air, Lavi couldn't avoid all of it. As she laughed with delight, he spat and wiped his face with a scarf.

"That was mean."

"You asked for it. What do you want?"

"We thought you were dead!"

Mia smiled.

"Wishful thinking."

Lavi stared at her coldly.

"We need to discuss the mission, and have breakfast, of course. Come on."

* * *

A thin vegetable soup was placed in front of her that she immediately slid across the table in Lavi's direction. He shook his head and slid it back, clearly just to spite her. It seemed that sensing the hope that came with the arrival of Exorcists the villagers agreed to give them lodgings for the night and their version of a meal. Mia did not want their post-apocalyptic food.

"You're going to be useless without breakfast," Bookman muttered, pushing the soup right under her nose. "Moving on, I should recount what was said yesterday, since you were not present. Köveskál was indeed home to many Akuma over the years, but it is unlikely that they have caused this particular situation. We believe it is a sorcerer."

He paused for dramatic effect while Mia choked on her soup. _This is it! Olivia is going to kill me if I waste this chance._

"The villagers are blaming the curse on the Shrine incident, but it is more likely that it was the _sorcerer's_ reaction to its destruction, not God's. The soldier became an Akuma, targeting people who were attempting to re-build it-"

"There's a curse…?"

"The werewolf curse– "

"What?"

"...though it is a little different than the usual myth." Bookman flipped over the cover of a book that had joined them for breakfast and pointed to an ink drawing of an animal scratched into the paper. "In this case, two random days a month, one villager becomes a _monster._ If they are not hunted down and killed before the sun rises they change back and become immune to the curse. Everyone in the Fort has been the monster and survived, hence this is considered the only safe place."

Mia looked back at the drawing. It looked more like a deer than a wolf, and was standing on it's hind legs in a horse-like fashion. It's eyes had been drawn in sapphire blue, the only hint of colour in the entire drawing.

"It doesn't really seem like an Akuma thing," Mia mused, "even for a level two that would be a weird ability... Probably not Innocence either if it's violent."

"Which is why we think it's a sorcerer," Lavi said, "who cast the curse. Can't figure out why though."

"I see. But if it's a sorcerer how is that our problem?"

The Bookmen narrowed their eyes at her, eerily synchronised.

"If it was them that killed the Finders, this is _fundamentally_ our problem," Lavi reminded her. "They pretty much declared war on the Black Order."

"Fine." She looked back to the drawing again, trying to figure out why it looked so beautiful. There was supposed to be a human being behind those giant unblinking eyes, but it looked more majestic than any person ever could.


	18. The Magic Architect Part 1

I do not own DGM.

Warning for language.

I know I said it was going to be one more chapter but I'm splitting it in two because otherwise it would be twice as long as the others and that just wouldn't feel right. I'll post the next one tomorrow or next week or whatever, I'm done editing anyway. I'm sorry it took this long, but this was a weird year and I think somewhere along the way I started to care about the quality of my writing which made it more and more terrifying to post things. And the ending (next chapter), which I hope you will hate, was decided on by a younger and more cynical version of me, so nowadays I'm kind of just a little horrified that I've written this thing at all. Enjoy.

* * *

You are powerful.

* * *

The trees were still a mystery, but the Bookmen vehemently refused to experimentally set them on fire. Lenalee would have agreed to the plan, Mia thought, as would most other Exorcists. They were being sensible and stupid.

"There's tens of them," she said, as they made their way through the forest looking for clues to find the Sorcerer, "nobody will miss one. I doubt the one who made them will notice, and we, on the other hand, would learn a lot."

"They show up every time a person dies, Mia," Lavi kept pointing out, "there's some symbolism in that."

"Who the fuck cares?" she grumbled, knowing already that it was a lost cause. She was only trying to convince herself that destroying death trees was somehow impolite. Listening to herself be a monster was interesting, sometimes. "They're creepy anyway, and who wants a _creepy_ memorial? If they're meant to symbolise that new life springs from death or some schmaltz like that then it's not working. They're dead trees, for dead people."

Lavi was silent for long enough that Mia thought he'd given up.

"It's still important," he said eventually. "Some of them think they're the souls trapped here by the curse, which would make destroying them technically murder."

"They are not souls," she assured him, "they're just pathetic symbols for pathetic people who need trees to be remembered by."

Neither of them responded to her so she stopped talking and simmered with inward anger at people's inability to remember their loved ones without reducing them to trees and trinkets. She had kept nothing of Ethel's, except for her journal which she sent back to her parents, because Ethel was etched too deep into her memories to ever be forgotten.

She had no idea why the Bookmen's opinion was being taken into account anyways. They were pretty much novices and just because she was younger and less knowledgeable about Hungarian culture they had somehow managed to take charge of the whole thing. It was infuriating and backward.

They reached the shrine and Mia once again activated her Innocence to look for any unusual signs. Its blandness was overwhelming. The only thing she could see was that the wild rose bush was being eaten up from its roots and the effects were visible in its blackened leaves.

"The rose is dying," she muttered, cupping a flower in her hand; it was the colour of souls smothered in dark matter, and the colour her hair used to be before it had faded to a soft, pale pink. The flower was still perfect and delicate, though, and smelled like summer at her parents' estate. Already experienced in destroying flowers, she tore a petal off and rubbed it on her palm. To her distress, Lavi picked one too and ate it.

"It wasn't like this yesterday," he mentioned, still chewing. "It's a pretty drastic change, unless something poisoned it or..."

"Or we disturbed it when we moved Mary," Bookman reasoned.

Mia felt like maybe it was time to remind them that plants did not have feelings and flowers were not edible, but said nothing. She sunk into the ground until her head was underneath and hundreds of bugs were crawling through her. It hadn't been obvious from above but the roots spreading out beneath the bush were glowing faintly with a colour stolen from the moon. Tiny flakes of light were floating away deeper into the black earth, leaving streaks of warmth as they passed by her soul.

Instead of being suffocating, the ground felt as comforting as a duvet. Breathing in the wild rose scent that permeated her grave she curled her legs into her chest and closed her eyes.

Behind her rested the soulless corpses of eight Finders.

* * *

"Oy, princess! Time to wake up."

She heard the voice like it was three miles away, too annoying to ignore, but if she opened her eyes and saw the silver tree again she would be stuck forever. With only a memory of it, she deactivated her Innocence and returned.

"What did you find?"

Mia told them nothing but went back when night fell to watch the tree dissolve. All she could do was be there when it died since it was their fault that the shrine was wrecked. Lavi did all he could to restore it exactly the way it had been but it made no difference.

Now that her eyes were fixed on the glow, she saw ghosts in her peripheral vision. The darkness to her right was like water reflecting stormclouds.

"You see the world through the same eyes as God."

This time the voice cut through dead silence like a knife. It was neither Lavi nor Bookman, it was a different kind of terrifying. She couldn't see the source.

"Here," it said from under her feet.

She recoiled, but it kept beckoning in a strangled whisper. Carefully she dipped her head into the space it was haunting and found an underground lake domed with stalactite teeth.

The ghost stood at the edge, visible despite the lack of light. The ruffles of her dress dipped into the water at the edge, sending semicircular ripples across to the other shore. Mia studied her face, but there was no feature she could accurately remember the moment she looked away. The lake stilled into a perfect plane.

"What is this?" She asked, crouching on top of the lake and running her fingers in an arc over the surface. Water splashed out into the air in black droplets, which disturbed her even more than the stillness. She looked back at the ghost. "Am I awake?"

"Your soul is." The ghost grinned happily. Mia noticed a gap in her teeth that she could commit to memory. It made her look somewhat silly, more so than all the ruffles and ribbons sewn into her dress. "But have you never wondered what will happen once that's all you have left?"

"What?"

"I wonder about it, and I know Grace does too."

 _Grace?_

Mia had been feeling paranoid for so long that it didn't occur to her that she was actually in danger of finding out what the afterlife was _right this moment_. She wanted to know group theory, not where souls went once there was nothing to keep them tethered to Earth. That was a question of science, a different kind of philosophy that just wasn't very fascinating.

"I don't," she told the ghost, truthfully, "but I am wondering what this place is."

"It's our underground lake." The ghost mirrored the previous movement of Mia's arm across the water surface, but this time the droplets looked like sparks. "The silver tree keeps it isolated."

Mia only stared at her, confused. The woman grinned again and covered her mouth with her hand like she hadn't been supposed to speak. She giggled.

"Look at you, you're unravelling."

 _Unravelling._

"Like a spool of thread pulled apart by a cat!"

She looked down at her hands and saw that she _was_ unravelling, exactly like her soul was made of loose threads. Seeing her fingers disintegrate finally startled her and in one frantic heartbeat, it hit her that what was happening was _death._ She rammed her fists against the roof of the cave, finding it solid as the rock it was made of. Her hands broke apart from the impact, leaving a looped string floating in front of her. She tried to de-activate her Innocence but couldn't find a path back to her body.

She kept screaming, desperate to wake, but this was it, she was _disappearing._ Her feet were gone, and her hair spiralled out of its tangles into a thin cloud. She didn't want to die, and the reasons for this were suddenly unimportant.

"Help me," she cried to nobody. The ghost watched her, amused, as Mia curled up in an attempt to gather her soul back into a coherent shape.

"There must be very few things keeping you together."

"Stop it, stop, I'm going to die," she begged, as if the ghost wasn't standing there specifically so that she could watch. _Not like this! Think!_

' _The silver tree keeps it isolated,_ _'_ she remembered hearing _._ She looked up towards where the tree was and saw its withering roots reached down into the cavern. Moonlight flakes floated down like dust motes, and to Mia, they looked suddenly like pieces of its soul.

"It's the same, isn't it? Which means I can destroy it."

"What?"

All she needed was something to keep her together. Mia closed her eyes and tried to think of specific reasons why dying right now was not a good idea. It wasn't just the blood promise with Olivia, because Olivia never occurred to her at these moments in time – in Hrebenne, Nathanael had to remind her of the scar on her hand. No, she didn't want to live solely for Olivia: she wanted to live for herself, just in case in some distant future she would feel happiness for more than five minutes at a time. It felt like the perfect reason, one that Sparrow would accept. In that future she would _know,_ so much more than she would know if she disappeared now, even if it wasn't all the knowledge in the world. The one thing that was a certainty was that only the living could continue to learn.

 _This is what hope is: faith and doubt eating each other, something imperfect made up of both and in spite of both. And I am selfish enough to want to hold onto it for myself._

The lake rippled, and in it she saw fire, grayscale and ghostly, and a dragon reflected in the waves. Of course she was a dragon; her soul was whatever she wanted to be because her soul was _her_ _self_. Laughing out the flames, she beat her wings to stir up more air currents, then crashed through the ceiling swallowing the whole tree.

"… _a_ _bata_ -NOOOO!"

It felt like some ridiculous dream, in which the stars were all blurring into each other and an old woman in a pointy hat was muttering strange words. Mia hovered above, the hurricane of her wings stirring up pages of spellbooks. The ghost emerged from the ground and threw her arms around the Sorceress but immediately disintegrated, screaming, floating off upwards, like the countless Akuma souls that Exorcists saved.

Mia opened her eyes, but her lungs made only feeble attempts to draw in air. For a full minute, she coughed out magical dust that felt less like moonlight and more like fire.

"She's gone," she heard somewhere to her right. She turned to what must have been Grace, ready to curse at her but what she saw was a pathetic, isolated creature, crying. She kept repeating those words hopelessly like it would make them fictional.

"Who was she?" Mia asked, curious. She couldn't shake the empathy; the Sorceress looked so alone.

"My mother..." she whispered, throwing her hat onto the ground in a practised motion. Her hands were stained with something dark which she smudged on her face wiping away tears. "The cursed one."

Mia thought that was somewhat weirdly phrased, then her hands came across a puddle of something beside her which she recognised as blood. It was not Mia's because she wasn't hurt, it must have been something necessary for the sorcery. She watched it drip slowly from her fingers, disgusting and thick. Her throat burned with magic that in retrospect she shouldn't have swallowed.

"You were going to use my soul to fix the tree, right?" she guessed, coughing out another batch of tree spirit flakes, "so that the ghost could stay."

Grace looked at her with resignation, but Mia just grinned.

"I get it… there's nothing worse than being left behind. I would have done the same."

"Then I won't apologise, _Exorcist_."

Mia nodded, but wiped her hands on some moss and reached into her backpack for the revolver. It occurred to her that being a dragon meant she wouldn't need it for Exorcising anymore, but it was useful for intimidation _._ It regressed into a weapon against people.

"I don't want you to. Though you could at least tell me what's going on."

The sorceress glanced towards the sky, towards where the ghost had floated off.

 _47 years ago, a foolish soldier cursed God and He, in righteous anger, cast His own curse one hundred times as terrible..._


	19. The Magic Architect Part 2

I do not own DGM.

Final chapter! Let me know what you think!

* * *

Grace Esztergom told the story in third person, disconnecting herself from it. It reminded Mia of the way she thought about Edith, and how that was so much simpler than admitting to herself that Edith and Mia were the past and present of the same person. She couldn't blame Grace for doing the same, though it seemed like an attempt to dodge the responsibility for her actions.

"I'm sorry we messed up the rose," Mia said because it was the one thing from the entire tale that she felt genuinely sad about, "we didn't know."

"It's fine. It's probably…" Grace sighed, "time I moved on. She's in a better place."

Grace had a sureness to her presence that was comforting when she wasn't trying to kill people. Mia let her sit in contemplation for a while. She thought about the blood that Grace had used for the spell that unravelled her soul, and if she still wanted to know what sorcery was. If it required sacrifice, then it wasn't really magic, but Olivia would never forgive her if she didn't at least try to find out.

"So you're a sorceress," she began.

"Look, I'm tired…" Grace started to get up, and Mia quickly raised her revolver and pointed it at her head. It was nice to see Grace hesitate and sit back down when half an hour ago the sorceress had been plotting her death.

"You still killed those Finders," Mia reminded her coldly. "It was unnecessary – they were only trying to save the world, that's all they ever do."

"I was scared," Grace repeated. She sounded upset at the memory, but Mia didn't think that her's was a good enough reason for mass murder. "The villagers were confused about them as well, they were just fresh stock for the curse, more people would have _died_."

"I was happier when you weren't making excuses… How did you even cast the curse?" she asked. It wasn't like she could just hand Grace over to the Order, she would end up in the same situation as the Exorcists. Mia couldn't allow that to happen even to someone who was effectively evil. Grace Esztergom belonged in a prison, however, so Mia couldn't let her go. Besides, magic was interesting and the sorcerers at the Order were secretive as hell.

"It was an accident," Grace smiled with her teeth, "I figured it out later, out of curiosity, but you won't understand the magic – it's not as simple as your Crystal. Real magic requires–"

Mia shifted the aim of the revolver thirty degrees to the right and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed through the night, joined by Grace's surprised yell.

"Shit! Fine–"

"Can you break it?"

Grace laughed, and her laughter echoed like the gunshot. Mia shifted her weight nervously. _I'm really not the_ _best_ _person for this..._ _W_ _here_ _'re_ _the Bookmen_ _when you need_ _them_ _?_

"Why would I? It's a masterpiece."

Whether Grace was really that proud of the blue-eyed monster was unimportant to Mia, but she wanted more time to come to the decision. It would be even better, she thought, if she didn't have to judge people like this at all.

"Really?" she asked, sceptically, taking her golem out of her pocket. "Your masterpiece is an accidental curse you cast fifty years ago? That's all your life's work amounts to?"

She was mostly hidden by the dark of the night, but Grace looked hesitant for a moment. Slowly, she picked up her hat and set it on her head, further obscuring her face. Mia continued to aim her revolver at her, and with the other hand switched the golem on and ordered it to call Bookman. Grace's eyes followed the electronic magical bat with unhidden curiosity, but it wasn't enough to make her lose focus.

"Soon you will see," she said ominously. "You won't have to judge me then."

Mia took a step backwards, a little nervous that the woman was reading her mind. Bookman was asking something through the golem, but she was too distracted to answer because Grace still had blood smeared across her face. It reminded Mia that she was talking to a person who wielded _magic,_ the most unpredictable phenomenon.

"What are you doing?" she asked the sorceress. The reply she received was a sad smile. Faster than Mia could register, Grace's hands folded into a set of strange gestures and she was gone.

The Bookmen found her shivering on the ground with a tree at her back. She didn't know how to start a fire, and the darkness and cold of the countryside were oppressive enough to make her thoughts descend into a small orbit around oblivion. She wondered why it was that faced with a simple way out, she still chose to stay. Grace's spell hadn't been that hard to break; it was like she hadn't even expected her to fight it.

Lavi had brought her a coat, because she had left it in the storage cupboard that had been acting as her room. She thanked him, reluctantly, gritting her teeth.

"Don't patronise me," she snapped at him, before he could say anything. He lifted his hands like he was trying to calm her down.

"Would you rather I shouted at you for losing the homicidal sorceress?"

"Yeah," she muttered, wishing he wouldn't speak at all. Bookman was investigating the little bowl of blood, and some alien symbols drawn onto the grass with mounds of fine salt. Grace had taken her books with her when she fled.

"How _could_ you, Mia!" Lavi exclaimed theatrically, "you wretched thing! Such a disaster, and all your fault!" Mia closed her eyes, leaning her back on a tree trunk so that a jagged piece of bark was painfully digging into her skull. She was pretending in her mind that he was being serious, which Lavi took as encouragement. "Now _all is_ _lost_!"

"How hurtful of you," she said flatly, noting that he had carefully avoided saying anything remotely truthful. He thought he was being kind, she reasoned.

"You're welcome."

Lavi was more bearable when he wasn't happy, but it was annoyingly difficult to upset him.

She told Bookman, "I think I might have stepped on some of the drawings." Bookman glanced at his apprentice, who had almost choked on a dramatic intake of breath, then looked at her with a fair amount of pity.

"No bother, this is almost certainly irrelevant," he said with a sigh. Even so, he copied them down into a notebook. Mia had already committed them to memory to draw for Olivia's secret research project when she got back.

"We should get back," Bookman said, "in case the fort is in danger."

The fort was not in danger. Mia knew this because she remembered how disinterested Esztergom had seemed about the village in general. Whatever she was planning – unless it required human sacrifice and it was fairly certain it wouldn't – the fort was probably safe. She explained this to the Bookmen, but they were politely doubtful of her ability to draw such sophisticated conclusions about people.

This time she stayed in the fort to activate her Innocence, wondering if turning her soul into a dragon was going to be more difficult when she wasn't in mortal danger. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and thought of Sparrow, smiling involuntarily at the hope of seeing her again.

When she flew through the ceiling, it was with wings. They caught more air than she expected of a non-material substance, which made flying a little more intuitive than it had been previously. With a _whoosh,_ she dug her claws gently on the roof of a watchtower and surveyed her surroundings. The sun had just risen over the horizon, and everything was covered in bright yellow light: the same colour as living human souls. She wasn't going to find anyone this way. Beating her wings against the air more for dramatic effect that actual need, she threw herself into the open sky. The fort flattened itself into its surroundings, even less impressive from above; Mia wondered how it was that anyone ever felt safe there.

About two miles off, she saw a white light, the kind that magic was made of. It was swirling above the ground on the side of a hill, so the sorceress must have been underground. Mia memorised as much as she could of the directions and returned to the fort, where Bookman and Lavi were waiting for her with expectations of valuable information. It took her a few minutes to decide what to tell them, and she spent the time pretending to gather back her bearings. Eventually, she just asked for a map.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, "if we do find her?"

"Report her to the authorities?" Lavi said, with a laugh. Bookman quietly reminded him not to be stupid, but he himself did not offer any ideas. They were trying to make her eat again and she was stubbornly refusing because she was still worried about what was going to happen to Grace Esztergom. Besides, whatever it was looked pretty awful and the fort only had wooden forks because all the cutlery had been molten down into weapons and hinges for the gate.

"She's not going to break the curse," Mia told them, "unless we give her a reason other than ethics. She's proud of it, in a way." Though Mia didn't approve of Grace giving up on her career so quickly, it wouldn't make sense to destroy her work if it meant that much to her. The villagers were doing an admirable job dealing with it anyway, excepting the wooden forks and the occasional murder.

Bookman shook his head slowly, "let the Order deal with its enemy."

"We _are_ the Order," Mia insisted defensively, "it's our decision."

"You want to let her go!" Lavi exclaimed suddenly, then asked still smiling, "whose side are you on, princess?"

Mia smiled back and shrugged. She didn't think Lavi cared much about whose side she was on, but she knew it was easier to fight if you knew the loyalties of your teammates. He wasn't accusing her of treachery, he was being practical.

"I don't think it's going to be as easy as you think to contain a sorceress," she said, "but we could try to offer her freedom in exchange for breaking the curse."

"That will make everyone happy," Lavi concluded, but Bookman shook his head again.

"Only if we keep it secret from the Order," he muttered thoughtfully.

"Of course." Mia drummed her fingers on the table in anticipation of having a secret to keep from the admins. She was a traitor now, she had gained a tiny little piece of freedom. This was what Nathanael had meant, she realised, about being sufficiently far from Central for rules to matter a little less. The Innocence couldn't kill her for this because Grace wasn't taking sides in the holy war; she was an enemy of the Order, not God.

Mia looked at the map and circled Grace's location on it in pencil.

The grass was yellow and dead, and she could see Grace's soul glowing softly from underneath. The fort-dwellers didn't know of any caves nearby, and an entrance proved impossible to find, so when they arrived at the hillside Grace was staying under Mia activated her Innocence and went to check it out on her own.

With trembling fingers, the sorceress was tying a knot in a rope, then she slung it over a wooden support beam. Mia watched her with horror, because the action was something that she'd imagined herself doing on several occasions. They were only daydreams. The dreadful day when the thoughts would become reality was still unreachable, and yet, here was a woman tying a second knot to secure a loop of rope two metres off the ground. Was this what Grace had meant when she said Mia wouldn't have to judge her? She was wrong.

Then she thought, _that's right this is impossible._ Grace wouldn't go through with it, she was only in that mindstate in which giving up seems like the best idea. In a few seconds she would go back to being murderous and lost. Mia had to laugh at her, and her misery, because it would be okay, because it couldn't end this way, and she couldn't watch Grace take her own life.

"Idiot!" she cried, "you're going to look back on this and laugh at how silly you were being!" The same way that Mia looked back at Hrebenne, and how childish she was when she thought it would be fine to just _let_ the Innocence betray her.

"You're never going to get that knot right. It's not like anyone really knows how to tie a noose, it just seems like the easiest way at first. Honestly, it would be simpler with a knife, you will bleed out quicker than you'll choke. You'll change your mind a million times when you're dying."

Grace untangled the knot and tied it again, and an occasional sob was the only sound in the cavern. The air became thin and filled with burned wax, so Mia snuffed out the candles one by one until it was pitch black and Grace had to crouch down and touch the ground for stability. A minute later, the Sorceress managed to find a match and struck it on the nearest wall.

"Mother?"

Mia felt a tightness in her chest, as Grace lit the candles again. She recognised fear buried in the whisper and kicked the barrel, but all she achieved was a slight wobble. Grace kept speaking in Hungarian, shifting the stand into a more stable position, and Mia couldn't understand a word but kept waiting for the woman to come to her senses.

She heard a laugh, high-pitched and sweet, like when Mia played along with misogynists, like the parody of a laugh from something that didn't believe in laughter.

"Hee hee hee! What a tragedy!"

Mia retreated into the rock wall, feeling the familiar pressure of a magical barrier at her back. The Earl's face, a permanent mask, grinned at Grace from the shadows, but like the cavern of the silver tree, this one was a solid enclosure.

"Finally… I knew you would come." Grace stopped faffing with the rope and straightened to her full height. "You're not the only one who feeds on despair for power."

"Eeee! Seems like we've been caught," the Earl's voice screeched out from underneath its teeth. It glanced at Mia, and through the fear, it was still unclear to her how such a cheerful costume could convey so much hatred. Death did not terrify her as much as being killed _by the Earl itself_ did.

Nevertheless, there was one other thing she kept thinking.

It was a reasonable conjecture that if the Earl died now, nobody else would have to sacrifice their life for the stupid holy war and all the things that Mia said about all the lives the Order ruined would be meaningless. Olivia could go home; the Wizards could continue to expose corrupt politicians; Lenalee could stop worrying about her family being gone one day. Nathanael could live forever.

She could become a mathematician.

Or not.

She was fine with the last being impossible. The other reasons were numerous and already enough and she was never very good at living to begin with; when Ethel died, Edith should have died with her, and none of this misery would have happened.

The third and last time she became a dragon was out of a desire for people to be free of the Black Order. The cavern, too small to contain her, blazed with magical fire, but Grace's soul was unhurt so that she could continue chanting the spells that had taken fourty-seven years to design.

In four spinning steps, the Earl tapped its way over to Grace and rested a pink umbrella on her hat. The sorceress slid sideways to escape it, showered in a snowy flurry of ash that settled on her hair, then waved her arms in a circle over her head and folded her fingers in the shape of a diamond. The space filled itself with a careening, hurtful magic that cut the air to pieces, twisting everything living into corpses and molten rock. Only nothing in the cave was truly living apart from the architect. Clumsily, with one wave of the pumpkin head, the Earl banished the spell leaving the cave in the dark and silence of nothingness.

A shuddering breath rang out.

Of course, they realised, no human being could defeat the Earl.

Mia, with very little space to manoeuvre, grabbed the pink umbrella from the Earl's grasp with her teeth and swallowed it. It screamed like a child, and the Earl made a disapproving sound, but the distraction was enough for Grace to clap her hands, disappear, and send the ceiling crashing down into the cave.

The sorceress was gone, the Earl was still intact, and Mia sank her teeth around its head while rocks smashed the rest of it to a bloody pulp and added to the fire. The umbrella, still screaming with rage, tore itself free through the scales of her skin and while the world slipped away, the Earl's grin shone cheerfully through the earth. Its hands reached for the dragon's head and twisted it until the skull was splinters.

Mia turned to dust knowing that the war would continue for many years to come. Who was she to challenge a being that was capable of such destruction? She was an Apostle of God who did not agree with Him. She was one of His mistakes; a failed experiment in redemption.


End file.
